I haven't received many comments about the book, even though Noam Chomsky wrote the blurb -- but then he writes lots of blurbs.
Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
> I ended up buying both Lessig and Michael Perelman's book and am
> about sixity
> pages into the latter. I think Mike's book is probably better, or
> rather more
> suited to what I am looking for: Class Warfare in the Information Age.
>
> So far the basic idea of the book is that information on production or
> something I call skill and knowledge, has always been the commodity that
> capital wants from labor so as to transform that information into
> production
> systems and products, or essentially steal it from the labor
> force. The advent
> of the computer and internet has essentially accelerated and extended this
> process, while reducing and depreciating the class that provides
> it. So, not
> only libertarians, but main stream political and economic communties would
> probably violently criticize the book if they read it at all.
>
> Chuck Grimes
> =========
>
> Michael P's CWIIA along with his Transcending the Economy [which I speed
> read today at UW library] point to an issue which is dear to public choice
> theorists and goes back to at least Adam Smith's Lectures on
> Jurisprudence--the phenomenon of rent seeking behavior. One could easily
> argue that all property rights are transfers accomplished under the aegis of
> the state and the appropriation of communal knowledge by the few is what
> gives the lie to any libertarian theory of market economies. The "firm" is
> just a legalized predatory structure to appropriate knowledge that emerges
> from relatively free flowing speech acts and "tacit knowledge" on the shop
> floor [or lab...]. Workers are free to contribute knowledge to lower unit
> costs via skills sharing but god forbid they use their knowledge to
> challenge the property and contractual structure that makes the
> appropriation of their knowledge "legal".
>
> Her/Him who controls the structure of property and contract controls the
> levers of wealth and this makes a mockery of the whole idea of reciprocity,
> merit and desert which have been around since the old testament and
> Aristotle. The no-compete clauses and other current forms of property rights
> smog has a real potential for scuttling the engine of accumulation,
> especially if cyberworkers and others wake up to an arrangement even the
> mafia envies [because the enforcement costs of the piracy are placed on the
> workers themselves]. Hence a lot of what Michael considers waste is just
> the result of workers resisting this legalized piracy as well as the fact
> that it creates systemic disincentives to create interesting "work",
> technological artifacts that would make life easier for far more people with
> less ecological and social damage [racism, paranoia, crime etc.]. At least,
> that's what I got out of the first pass at "Transcending"...The nice thing
> about Michael's books is that he lays it out with stories rather than
> econospeak.
>
> The good soldier Sveijk's brother,
>
> Ian
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu