[KEYWORDS:
Commons, Information Commons, General Intellect, Frontier, Bad Frontier,
Immaterial Labour, Affective Labour, Paolo Virno, Karl Marx, Grundrisse,
Fragment on Machines, Fixed Capital, Internet, ARPA, ARPANET, Piracy, Kingdom
of Piracy, KOP, Enclosures, Diggers, Hobbes, Sovereignty, Oppositional
Intellect]
Towards an ‘Army of
Ideas’ -
Oppositional Intellect & The Bad
Frontier
J. J. King <jamie@jamie.com>
[...] you strive to take away my
livelihood, and the liberty of this poor weak frame of my body of flesh, which
is my house I dwell in for a time; but I strive to cast down your kingdom of
darkness, and to open hell gates, and to break the devil’s bonds asunder
wherewith you are tied, that you my enemies may live in peace; and that is all
the harm I would have you to have.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes.
To
commence anecdotally: I recently ecountered, uncoincidentally in a part of
London that has over the last five to seven years been gentrified beyond
anything but the barest degree of recognition, in a cafe that has got itself up
in some sort of impression of a souk, and in which coiffed quasi-bohos lounge
with lattes and smouldering joints, a young ‘cracker’ who had until
recently been part of a pirate community which took part both in the
‘chipping’ of mobile phones (releasing a user’s hardware from
indenture to a particular service provider), the copying of DVDs, modification
of gaming consoles, so on. The person in question had been engaging in such
activities for years, he explained, until realising that, far from challenging
traditional
market structures, his group was actually performing a form of underground marketing
that had already been recognised by certain corporations – he named Sony
specifically. Increasingly those corporations were using underground
‘cracker’ communities to distribute early versions of their
products which, with their readymade illict halo, had an instant appeal to the
youth market at which they were largely targeted. Disgusted, the young activist
immediately ceased his activities.[2]
This anecdote speaks very
well to the problems of ‘piracy’ and its status as a form of
oppositional culture. It gives us cause to remember that there can be no
Kingdom of Piracy without a Kingdom of Property, and, therefore, to think
through the ways in which we sustain and constitute the very economies we want
to operate against. In this essay, by exploring a series of proximate and
crosslinked ideas, I will attempt to articulate the reasons why a
‘Kingdom of Piracy’ must, if it is to ever move beyond the position
of intolerable ‘counterculture’ naivety expressed by the subject
above, actively configure itself as opposition, and not assume that it posseses a privileged oppositionality which,
in fact, is all too easily co-opted by commodity culture.
This argument is not only
not as esoteric as it might first appear, but is in fact aboslutely timely in
discussions that have been going on for a while (in one circle) around the
so-called ‘information commons’ and ‘intellectual
property’, and (in entirely another) around ‘immaterial’ or
‘affective labour’ and the ‘general intellect’. It
seems to me that we can profit by bringing these two discourses into proximity,
for a limited period only, and letting them duke it out. Finally we shall
progress onto a terrain that I want to call, tentatively, ‘the bad
frontier’, the best place to begin the vital business of working towards oppositional
intellect,
the final neologism of this investigation, by which I mean a general intellect
that constitutes itself in deliberate opposition to (and perhaps flight from
– they can amount to the same thing) market capitalism.
A new
phrase, ‘information commons’, has gained significant currency as a
way of describing community-shared information, particularly that enabled and
enacted through information networks. Proponents argue its value as a
theoretical premise lies in its ability to ‘provide a coherent framework
and language for explaining phenomena that are otherwise ignored or
misunderstood’[3]
today, to whit, certain ‘constitutional and cultural norms that are
increasingly threatened in the new digital environment.’ [4]
‘Information
commons’, it is held, is a metaphor that can help us understand the
importance of the new kinds of ‘social spaces’ opening in and
around networks. ‘Commons’ itself is also, no less importantly, a
way of suggesting the commonality of certain key resources- genetic code, for
example, or, more generally, scientific data – and promotiong our shared
responsibilities towards such resources by emhpasising their universal value.
But the term takes us analepetically to the commons of feudal europe, an extraordinarily
complex system of open fields and common rights which supported Europe’s
agrarian community throughout the 1500s. These commons were under community
regulation: the peasantry had customary rights over them which had never been
encoded in law,[5] rights
premised on the ‘self-governing and customary elements in the structure
of the pre-capitalist village community’,[6]
and on that community’s ‘collective memory’.[7]
Ominously,
the first point of similiarity often drawn between the feudal commons and the
‘information commons’ is with regards to the Enclosures, through
which the landed classes of England, and a rising class of mechant farmers, siezed and
developed these lands in the advance of what Hannibal Travis terms the
‘propertarian ideology’.[8]
The Enclosures asserted over free farming peasants and their land near-absolute
rights of perpetual duration, substituting communal land regulation for
individual tenure.[9] Through the
the 1700s and early 1800s, a series of 4,000 acts of English Parliament
authorized the seizure of some seven million acres of commons. Village-held
lands were fenced off and given to private interests, as customary relations
fell, piecemeal, to the forces of law and coercion which supported this
‘propertarisation’.
The
‘Enclosure’ of the ‘information commons’ is taken by
James Boyle[10] and others
to be an apt way of describing the attempts of commercial interests to maintain
or gain control over, for example, the information shared over various social
and information networks, and the valorisation of this information as
‘intellectual property’. The landmarks in this process are already
well-documented, and since it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a
thorough review of them all, a few examples will have to suffice here. 1998’s
US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which added twenty years to the
copyright protection of works produced after 1923, ensured that many thousands
of works that had fallen or were due to fall into private hands would not re-enter
the public domain until 2019; the same year’s infamous Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, prohibiting the circumvention of any technical measure that
controls access to a work, criminalised not only the manufacture and
distribution of software that can bypass technical protection measures, but
even the mere sharing of information about that
protection[11]; today
Microsoft’s ‘Palladium’ project attempts to secure
information as ‘intellectual property’ by engineering its operating
system such that the average user will find it very difficult to run anything
other than Microsoft-‘authorised’ files. The intended outcome of
all of these initiatives is to convert disrete sets of freely shared or
shareable information into privately controlled commodities – and to
ensure that those sets whose commodity-status is currently challenged retain
that status.
The last few
years have seen longstanding provisions for access to scientific knowledge
begin to fall to a similar set of processes. Patent claims increasingly reach
further ‘upstream’ from end products, covering fundamental
discoveries that provide the knowledge base for future product development.[12]
The patent is taken to play a critical role in the development of
pharmaceutical products, and the support of aggressive patenting extends
through government and legislature of both North America and Europe. The TRIPS
(Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) agreement, formulated by the World
Trade Organisation, means that all WTO states are forced to introduce patent
legislation into national law that makes patents available for any invention or
product that meets the criteria of novelty, inventiveness and industical
applicability.[13] This
definition includes biotechnology, and provides for the patenting of life-forms.
It is not at all in question that these are significant and concerted attempts at preventing various networks - public, academic, scientific and agrarian - from the free sharing of information and common-wealth through the construal of such as ‘property’. But whereas, in the case of a commonly shared physical resource - aquifers, for example, forests, or the gene-pool[14] – it might be possible to imagine a kind of ‘enclosure’, is the same true of purely informational economies involving audio, text, film and spoken language? What are the consequences of using the notion of ‘information commons’ to conceptualise such attempts as ‘enclosure’?[15]
There are serious
consequences, first of all, to reading information as constitutive of a space
in its own right. The internet-as-territory (‘cyberspace’), and specifically
as ‘frontier’ are obvious exampes of such a reading. Via the
imaginary-historical frontier of Frederick Jackson Turner, with its
radicalising economic, social and political potentials, the science-fictional
frontiers of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein and William Gibson, the
militarily enacted frontiers of the Cold War, and the ‘Final
Frontier’ of ‘outer’ space, the Internet became constituted
in the popular mind of the last decade as a ‘new frontier’, a
‘wild west’, a ‘place’ in which exploration,
innovation, self-fulfillment, self-realisation and wanton speculation were, as
on the original imaginary frontier, the rule: the grand narrative of the
American Idea played out over this novel information network.
Internet-as-cyberspace-as-frontier is still a powerful formulation today. The
fact that both the latter terms have fallen into disuse does not change one
iota its instrumentality in the net’s development as a socioeconomic
architecture. And, in the shape of the ‘information commons’, we
can see a new spatial imaginary rising up to take its place.
But, as with the ‘digital frontier’, there are signs that the ‘information commons’ is not necessary or sufficient or to its object. In what sense is a ‘second enclosure’ now underway? In point of fact, the distribution of ‘intellectual property’ may be systematically checked and contested, but it is nonetheless virulent: not only unabated, but more rife than ever. Media types currently traversing various networks include audio files (most popularly in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats), images (JPEG, GIF), video (MPEG, AVI, DivX;-) ) including but not limited to full feature films, works of literature in ‘plaintext’ or other forms, essays, academic papers, textual discussions on Web-based boards (using, for example, software like Slashdot or Kuro5hin) and Usenet, weblogs (most often a form of public diary), databases (for example of search queries), software and code libraries ( ‘Free Software’ under the GNU copyleft license, but proprietary software also circulates freely) scientific data, molecule research, and so on and so forth. All of this despite the bilateral legislation and trade agreements, despite attempts at hardware restriction, despite systematic erosion of freedom of speech rights: the expansion of this shared body of information continues apace.
A very recent example speaks volumes
about the degree of desperation now being experienced by the establishment as a
consequence of this burgeoning ‘Kingdom of Piracy’: the attempt by Senator Hollings of the U.S.
Senate to pass a bill allowing companies to engage in licensed sabotage of peer to peer networks. What is revealed in
this declaration of war on the multitude of p2p users seems to depend on
personal prediliction. The media owner sees in it gloves-off support by the
American legislature for IP rights – to the extent of legalising
corporate warfare. The commons-protectionist sees in it doom for the commons
and a statement of the intent to decimate peer information architectures. We,
on the contrary, can read in it an implicit admission that other forms of civil
control are simply not working, and indeed that the legislative and
technological ‘enclosures’ so bemoaned by commons proponents are
more or less ineffective. In what other context would state-licensed corporate
sabotage manifest itself as a possible strategy?
It possible that the ‘information commons’ is not only beyond protection, but beyond control? Is it realistic to maintain definitive enclosure as a possibility, and to conceive of (a sort of ‘ecological’) protectionism as the best or only solution to that enclosure?[16] Is it possible that, in the case of our informational communities, we need to think not of defending against, but of attacking with?
Introducing the General Intellect
In an interview
for Mute magazine conducted by Ted Byfield, ‘information commons’
proponent James Boyle explicitly links his project to a ‘Marxian’
one.[17]
This is curious for two reasons: first, since Boyle often carries out defense of the ‘information commons’,
posed against the Draconian ‘fencing’ off of ideas and social
knowledge, by arguing that such ‘enclosures’ are a
counterproductive check on innovation. The argument that a regulated, shared,
common resource is the best, most productive and ‘ethical’ way to
structure capital in the tertiary ‘informational’ economy seems
about as far from Marx and Marxism as it is possible to get.
The
second reason it is suprising is that Marx has already come up, in the Grundrisse, with a very potent way
of understanding the ‘economy of information’, one which presents a
set of serious challenges to proponents of the ‘information
commons’. Marx’s idea, which comes complete with its own phrase,
the ‘general intellect’, has enjoyed its own popularity in the last
six years or so, particularly with Italian autonomist theorists such as Antonio
Negri and Paolo Virno, who have rather successfully sought to take it beyond
the bounds in which Marx’s text deliniated it.
Marx uses this term
‘general intellect’ to refer to the social knowledge or
‘collective intelligence’ of a society at a given historical
period. Just as collective corporeal power is necessary to complete certain
tasks of production, so too production employs collective intellectual power. As technologies and machines become more
important as a means of production, Marx says, the creation of real wealth will
come to depend not on the direct expenditure of labour time in production, but
on two interrelated factors: technological expertise – ‘scientific
labour’ - and organisation – ‘social combination.’ [18]
The crucial factors in production become the ‘development of the general
powers of the human head’; ‘general social knowledge’;
‘social intellect’ and ‘the general productive forces of the
social brain.’[19]
In other
words, it is during the translocation of the business of production into productive
technologies – ‘fixed capital’ – that social knowledge becomes a
‘direct force’[20]
in market capitalism.
In three distinct moments
just such a translocation has occurred in the predominant capitalist countries;
from economies driven by agriculture and the extraction of raw materials in the
Middle Ages, to industry and the manufacture of durable goods in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, to the current paradigm in which services and the
manipulation of information are the dominant economic factor.
In the move
towards an industrial-informational economy,
'intellectual' labour has become a critical driver of the entire capital
system, even of what might be called 'traditional' industries. We could think
of the crucial role of the 'creative' in selling products, of artist
communities in city 'regeneration', or, more generally, of the centrality of
traditionally ‘cultural’ discourse in establishing what we 'buy
into' across the board. One only need to look at today’s stock market to
understand that the intellectual work that goes into 'representing' a company,
that labour undertaken by such as Arthur Anderson, Accenture, by CEOs, by
marketing companies and PR gurus, by city 'analysts' and stock-pumpers the
world over, is far more important to that company's 'value' than any 'honest'
assessment of its 'bottom line', profit and loss account, or even projected
earnings. (And indeed, the combined ‘free’ and immaterial labour of
hundreds of thousands of day-traders and more casual private investors and
speculators, has already been observed to have extraordinary market-moving
power.)
The
formula is simple. Once fixed capital takes care of the mass of production,
what becomes important is the knowledge that operates, designs, maintains,
directs and deploys it. The key innovation of the Italian autonomists
is the vital observation that this ‘mass intellectuality’, this
ensemble of `know-hows' which supports capital, is not limited to those who
‘directly’ minister capital’s machines, but actually is
comprised of ‘the social body’ itself, a ‘repository of
knowledges indivisible from living subjects and from their linguistic
co-operation’[21],
comprising a whole gamut of qualifications, modes of communication, local
knowledges and language games. For Antonio Negri, this ‘mass
intellectuality’ is indeed the defining activity of a whole
‘post-Fordist proletariat’. For Paolo Virno, the ‘general
intellect’ extends right the way down into the ‘epistemic models
that structure social communication’ itself, the ‘intellectual
activity of mass culture, no longer reducible to ‘simple labor,’ to
the pure expenditure of time and energy’:
There converge in the productive power of the general
intellect, artificial languages, theorems of formal logic, theories of
information and systems, epistemological paradigms, certain segments of the
metaphysical tradition, ‘linguistic games’ and images of the world.
In contemporary labor processes there are entire conceptual constellations that
function by themselves as productive ‘machines’, without ever
having to adopt either a mechanical body or an electronic brain.[22]
What does
all this mean? Let us return to the example of the stock market. The value of a
company, of course, is not only supported by the various actors and
institutions immediately orbiting it, not merely by ‘economic
factors’ but also by the economy of social life itself; by the
entire gamut of ‘language games’ (meant, roughly, in the
Wittgensteinian sense) that surround, inform, and provide the
‘bedrock’ upon which the company’s idea of itself is founded,
and upon which it sells itself and (decreasingly) its product back to the very
communities that substantiate that value. One can see this clearly in the
intimate relation of the stock market to social change. Each of us, insofar as
we act, speak, read, write, think and move through our culture in various
modalities, are more or less implicated in the processes of valorisation and
de-valorisation that cause the market’s peaks and troughs. In this sense,
we never stop ‘working’. The so-called ‘production of
affect’, the constitution of
subjectivity, is a full time job. So is the production of desire. And it is
clear that this mobilisation of the general intellect in the service of
capital’s machinery is more critically important than ever before.
Capital has become utterly dependent on our ability to conceive of, and
constitute desire for, new products, new markets; we have trained ourselves to
appreciate subtle variegations in all products (cars, houses, clothes, and so
on) and to link those variegations not only to notions like
‘status’ and ‘style’, but to the fundamentals:
‘happiness’, ‘pleasure’, ‘freedom’. The
general intellect, our own form-of-life, is therefore discovered as absolutely
complicit in the production of the horrible state of abjection in which we
currently find ourselves. And capital has become absolutely dependent upon this
complicity, this willing domestication of our ways of life to its imperatives.
It is more
important than ever to the market that ‘knowledge, skill, and [...] the
general productive forces of the social brain’[23]
are put to work, and put to work in the right way.
And in that very dependency lies a striking
political potential.
‘Information Commons’: Meet
‘General Intellect’
Surely the
shortcomings of ‘information commons’ are obvious from even this
cursory reading of ‘general intellect’. ‘Commons’ promotes
the idea of the ‘shared space’ of ‘ideas and
information’ as somehow distinct from (although linked to) the market, to
capital, a privileged ‘zone’ that, on the one hand, requires
‘protection’ from market forces, and, on the other seeks to satisfy
the demands of that market through its putative ‘freedom.’ ‘General intellect’ allows
us to see the always-already implicated nature of social communities, right
down into the very fabric of sociality, and therefore the retarded nature of
conceiving of a ‘space of ideas’ that could ever subsist ‘outside’ it. What could be
the meaning of ‘enclosure’ or of ‘protection’ against
enclosure in such a context? How, after all, could capital more thoroughly
contain or ‘enclose’ ‘this plural, multiform constantly mutating
intelligence’[24]
of mass intellect within its structures than it does already? Is the
‘information commons’ not already folded into capital? Is capital
not also folded into it? ‘Enclosed’ or ‘unenclosed’,
won’t the two’s mutual embrace remain as tight?
The second
decimating feature of ‘general intellect’ for the
‘information commons’ is its illumination of the political
potential of contemporary social consciousness. ‘Information
commons’ relegates social knowledge to the status of a ‘threatened
ecology’, immediately subjugating it to those powers nominally able to articulate
its ‘protection’ – in this case, presumably, the
liberal-democratic regimes of Europe and North America, prompted into action by
some ungodly admixture of left-liberal-lawyer lobbyists, NGO gonks and
wild-eyed info-ecologists.[25] In doing so, it only
promotes the role of intellectual labour in the production of consumption, in
market-regulated cultural and scientific ‘advances’ that only
rarely equal more than the development of new products and new markets.
For reasons that I will
now expand on, assuming this subjugant position can be seen as mistaken and
unnecessary. The absolutely crucial role that we all have, as intellectual or
'immaterial' labourers, in the current scene should not be underestimated. It
is crucial to understand the extent to which the general
intellect, given its paramount importance and complete imbrication with the
processes of capital, can begin to do more than simply facilitate production,
and more than demand ‘protection’ on the basis of such
facilitation. We must go further, and ask at what moment this shared force, already
mobilised by capital, could begin to constitute itself against capital. In
doing so we arrive at the root of
‘oppositional intellect’.
Oppositional Intellect... And The Bad Frontier
It
is worth noting that Gerrard Winstanley, ‘representative’ of the
anti-Enclosure ‘Digger’ movement, never limited his demands to the
‘protection’ of common land or to arguments against enclosure.
Winstanley’s claims went far further than reeastabling the pre-enclosure
situation and the removal of the Norman Yoke; he wanted the restoration of the
‘the pure law of righteousness before the Fall’[30].
True human dignity would be possible only when communal ownership was established
as a general condition, and buying and selling of land and labour ceased altogether.[31]
For Winstanley, like Marx, the state would wither under such conditions:
‘What need have we of imprisonment, whipping or hanging laws to bring one
another into bondage?’ he asked. ‘Only covetousness made theft a
sin.’[32]
Winstanley challenged property theory at its strongest, not arguing for
a privileged zone of free exchange, but for the absolute abolition of
individualist property relations, the only thing that could get rid of the
coercive state and the preachers of sin, both of which had come into place to
protect property:
(To the
accusation that his beliefs would ‘destroy all government and all our
ministry and religion,’ Winstanley replied cooly, ‘It is very
true.’[34])
We too need
to expand the scope of our ambitions as immaterial labourers. Marx, we hope,
was right to argue that the motion of scientific knowledge and social
co-operation, capital’s motors, would ultimately destroy capital: but it
seems likely that the development
of the deliberate intent of the general intellect to produce
this destruction is one of its necessary conditions. The expected huge increase
in the value of intellectual labour is occurring, and for the
‘information class’, as I have argued in a recent essay, private
ownership of material objects has become absolutely relegated to the value of
the ‘brand of me’[35].
But let us leave aside the notion that automation and socialisation together
create the possibility of—or necessity for—the ultimate
dispensation with wage labour and private ownership. Capital may be working
towards its own dissolution as the dominant social form,[36]
but oppositionality can only help expedite the process.
What forms
of action might this oppositionality dictate? I want to end this essay by
offering some tentative suggestions. The first hinges on the notion that
‘frontier’, this dialectics of ‘sectional
cleavage’, of economic expansion and innovation in
‘wilderness’ zones, underpins the capital cycle.[37]
It reverses the valency of this sectional dialectic, producing what I am
tentatively calling ‘bad frontier’. (We need not fall back into the
practice of conceptualising the general intellect as territory in order to do
this. Let us simply preserve the idea of frontier as a dialectical process of
innovation and co-option. This always-already co-opted nature of territories-yet-to-be-exploited
has far more in common with general intellect than it does with
‘information commons’.)
Can we
conceive of activities that the general intellect could undertake ‘in the
wilderness’ that, once co-opted, might begin to operate against capital?
Can we imagine constituting a shared community of ideas that, expecting such
co-option and acting in prescience, deliberately designs itself to appear,
perhaps, palatable, but to be, in fact, poisonous?[38]
The ‘dot com’ bubble manifests itself as something of a template
here: the production of ‘business plans’ which, glittering brightly
with the promise of future accumulations, in fact only drained money from
venture capital coffers and burned it systematically in the ridiculously consumptive
lifestyles of the information class masquerading as ‘entrepeneurs’.
Might there be other actions that could be equally damaging to capital that
could take into account this formula, ‘bad frontier’?
Returning to
the Italian Autonomists’ notion of the centrality of language, of the
constitutive social structures of the everyday, in the operation of capital, I
want to finally suggest that, in formulating oppositional intellect, a return
to Artaudian insanity via Burrough’s ‘language-virus’ might be
a potent strategem. Of course we must confront the problem that capital itself,
even on its own bizarre terms, is ‘insane’. Nonetheless: could an
institutionalisation of discrete ‘insanity’ within the class of
immaterial workers, this ‘new proletariat’, inform a series of actions
that, when subsumed into capital, would be productive not merely of the fiscal
atrophy associated with the ‘dot com’ boom, but of a more thorough
discombobulation, a warp in the weft, the folding-in of something too corrosive
to contain? If the development of communications networks truly has an organic
relationship to the emergence of the world order— effect and cause,
product and produce – then our communications must not only express the
movement of globalization, but must organise it through the multiplication and
structured interconnections of its networks. Let us formulate disconnections
and abhorrent structures. Let the next ‘enclosure’, the next
folding-in of our life-world to capital, find us clutching something wicked.
Let us not beg a ‘protection’ for which we have no need. Let us
attack, instead, with the full force of our ‘Army of Ideas’.
[1] G.H. Sabine, Ed., The Works of Gerarrd
Winstanley (Cornell University Press, 1941), p. 333.
[2] The individual in question wishes to
remain anonymous.
[3] David
Bollier, ‘Why we must talk about the information commons’,
presented at the American Library Association retreat on ‘New Technology,
the Information Commons and the Future of Libraries,’ November 2-4, 2001,
Wye River, Maryland. See also Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of
Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002, forthcoming.)
[4] Ibid.
[5] George C.
Comninel, ‘English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism’, in The
Journal of Peasant Studies (July 2000) pp.1-53.
[6] E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (London:
Penguin, 1991), p.238.
[7] Thompson, English Working Class, p.238.
[8] Hannibal Travis, ‘Pirates of the
Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian copyright and the First
Amendment’ in Mark Berkely Technology Law Journal (Spring 2000)
[9] It is worth
noting, however, that the right of ‘perfect usufruct’, of utilising the land
without altering or depleting it, had never existed free of contestation. Even in
the sixteenth century it had been in direct antagonism with the Common Law
established by William the Bastard after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the
so-called ‘Norman Yoke’ which rested upon the individual rights of
freehold tenure. In this light, the prolonged and systematic elimination of
custom by Common Law that occurred from the sixteenth century onwards can be
seen merely as the realisation of a longstanding ideological conflict.
[10] ‘We are in
the middle of a second enclosure movement; it sounds grandiloquent to call it
"the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind" but in a very
real sense, that is just what it is....’ Boyle writes in the introduction
to his paper in the proceedings of the Duke Conference on the Public Domain
(available as a PDF online).
[11] As has been
lamented on many occasions since ’98, the DMCA eliminates the
public’s right to ‘fair use’, which has allowed people to
quote and re-use works in certain contexts and venues. The DMCA also overrides
the ‘first-sale’ doctrine, the legal rule that allows people to
share the books or videotapes they buy with whomever they want. The perceived
need for this strict control is a direct function of the ‘non-excludable’
nature of digital media, for a brief discussion of which, see the body of this
text, below. Controlling the flow of works in society to serve private commercial
ends, the DMCA is a direct affront to America’s much loved First
Amendment.
[12] See Arti K. Rai
and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, ‘The Public and the Private in
Biopharmaceutical Research’, also part of the Duke Law Conference
proceedings.
[13] TRIPS Article 27(1)
[14] And the potential to
‘enclose’ the gene-pool, it seems, is directly related to the low
level of penetration of information on genetic engineering into the public
domain. Heath Bunting’s ‘Biotech Hobbyist’ project sardonically
tried to address this issue. In time, if the shifting and splicing of genetic
information becomes plausible in a home lab, the ‘enclosure’ of
genetic data will also be problematised.
[15] Although it is quite crucial to note the
constant, constitutive relations between ‘intellectual’ and
material propety, it is to the ‘information commons’ that this
essay restricts its critique.
[16] I will avoid examining
here, because it seems unnecessarily confusing, Boyle’s related notion of
‘an
environmentalism for the Net,’ which seeks to turn the defence of the
‘informational environment’ into a movment, presumably replete with
NGOs given over to this protection. (The notions of ‘commons’ and
‘environmentalism’ are quite distinct, as Ted Byfield points out,
arising in different regions with dramatically different social and political
conditions.)
[17] Ted Byfield, ‘Control Shift
Commons’, in Mute magazine,
archive available at
<http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/issue20/boyle.htm>
[18] Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705.
[19] Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 694,
705, 706, 709.
[20] Marx, Grundrisse, p . 706.
[21] Paolo Virno,
‘Notes on the General Intellect,’ in Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Saree
Makdisi,
Cesare Casarino, & Rebecca E. Karl (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 270.
[22] Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and
Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus’, in Paolo Virno and Michael
Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy, A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996) , p. 22.
[23] Marx, Grundrisse, p. 694.
[24] Jean-Marie
Vincent, ‘Les automatismes sociaux et le “general
intellect.'”’, in Futur Antérieur 16 (1993),
p. 121 (trans. by Nick Dwyer Witherford in Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits
of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois: 1999),
available at <http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dyerwitheford/index.htm|>
[25] It is difficult to
sense which way Boyle and the others are coming at this: defending the
‘Commons’ in order to defend market capitalism; or preaching the language
of market capitalism in order to defend a commons whose perceived
‘autonomy’, at any rate, they seem prepared to ditch in the
cause... Were establishment forces to agree to ‘protecting’ the
‘commons’, to hold off from ‘enclosure’, they would do
so simply because they had understood the sophisticated argument that this was
they best way of valorising
‘free’ intellectual labour, of putting it to work. This is a
point not all that difficult to comprehend; think again of the ‘pirate’ fileshare
community which in fact operated as a trailblazer for music consumption of the
typical form; or of bloggers who are the prey of idle and incompetent
journalists; of the fact that ‘free software’ is now a recongised
and operational business model; or of the incorporation of intellectual and
theoretical discourse taking place in public discussion lists and forums into
state- sponsored and –sponsoring academic discourse..
[26] In the mid sixities Bob Taylor
developed the first stages of ARPANET as a solution to the problem of computing
resources becoming monopolised by the work of particular research groups within
ARPA’s funding suite. The principle of networking turned out to satisfy a
series of economic imperatives: the isolation of ARPA’s computers was leading
to costly machines being underutilised, and the general lack of communication
between research efforts was leading to unnecessary duplication of work. By
building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers undertaking
similar work in diverse locations could share their results and resources.
There was a consequent relief on DARPA’s budget.
[27] Or, to put it
technically, digital information is ‘non-excludable’. Let us by all means avoid
Stewart Brand’s 1984 anthropomorphisation. Information does not ‘want
to be’ anything!
[28] This is not the place to enter into a
discussion about the possibilities for centralised control within the
‘distributed’ structure of the internet. Suffice it to say that the
political experiment of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
as a center of ‘net governance’ and enforcer of digital IP
‘rights’ seems to be in the final throes of failure. New IP
enforcement initiatives are already having to contend with the
‘post-web’ context, for example peer-based information distribution
architectures that do not rely on domains and therefore can dispense with the
DNS, registries, registrars, ICANN and the ruins of the tendentious IP
enforcement structure botched together by WIPO and the rest. In fact the best
way to conceive of ‘control’ is not through the attempt to
instigate centralised or ‘top-down’ power within distributed
systems, but in terms of bio-power. See, on ICANN, J.J. King, ‘They Came,
They Bored, They Conquered’, in Mute Magazine, Spring 2002; on distribution and biopower, see J.J. King ‘Cyberspace as
‘Technology of Power’, Chapter Six in ‘The Cultural
Construction of Cyberspace’ <www.jamie.com/thesis/thesis.pdf>
[30] Sabine, The Works of Gerarrd
Winstanley, p.292., quoted in Christopher Hill, The
World Turne Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), p. 134.
[31] Sabine, pp. 316, 519-20, 595-6, cf. pp.
192 and epigraph to that chapter; again quotes in Hill. P.134.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Sabine, pp. 262, 253-4.
[34] Sabine, pp. 567-9.
[35] See J.J. King, ‘Break Down:
Landy’s (Failed) Gesture and the General Intellect’, in Metropolis
M (2002, forthcoming).
[36] Marx, Grundrisse 700.
[37] Territorial gains in the move ‘out’ and
‘away’ are accompanied by the capital benefits arising from the
exploitation of new resources: following such gains an increasing saturation of
newly-taken territory produces the need to expand (‘go West’)
again.
[38] I keep wanting to use the phrase
‘bad snacks’ here, for which – admittedly in a different
context – I have Dr. Angela Piccini to thank.