There's not too much on IP. A fair amount on the productivity debate, income/wealth distribution, the nature of "work," "globalization," and the hypertrophy of finance. Not quite finished yet. Soon.
Doug
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I don't know what it is about IP that helps focus my hatred of capital, neoliberalism, and whole ball of nonsense called the world these days, but, it does. It seems to me that the concept of intellectual property has exploded beyond its former absurd proportions.
This impression could reflect some reality or it could be just the result of neoliberal propaganda. But that is something I would like to know through some empirical means, like a table or chart or something that was supposed to be a measure of its expansion.
The general concept of intellectual property forms a link between Michael Perelman's Class Warfare in the Information Age, and Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.
What I want to argue (despite the fact I don't have the background to do so effectively) is that IP is at the core of so-called new economy; that it is increasingly becoming the only kind of product our economic machinery wants to invest in production (because it is so profitable); and that because it has no concrete value but is rather an artificially constructed object or product, it is driving the absurd hypertrophy of finance; is one of primary centers of the globalization process; and is increasingly enveloping our concepts of work.
Because IP is nothing and has to be constructed, it is increasingly determining the architecture of cyberspace, in order to prescribe and preserve its illusively objective status as a product, sold for profit (partly LL's point about code as law). But there is more, since a fair proportion of the service sector is similarly constructed through a kind of artificial or legal imposition of what can be defined as a product and as property. HMO's are example of this process of creating a product out of nothing more than a list of subcontracts and rules. Another example is the idea that a computer program is technology.
MP raises the issue of what is IP, by questioning the idea that information is a commodity. And LL shows how a commodity can be created out of the architecture of a virtual space. Together, MP and LL start to shape a radical perspective which leads back to the heart of questioning capitalism and property. LL talks about an intellectual commons and the idea that we are propertizing that commons. MP uses the idea of information as a commodity to reach a related point.
Like I said I don't have the background and don't know where to go with this. But somehow the concepts around IP start to explain how we can have a so-called booming economy and produce almost no increase in the material well being of either our country or anyone else's we are exploiting. In my material mind, it would be a much different world, if the top five percent got to their high positions by producing things that fed, clothed, housed, and improved the lives of the other ninety-five percent. But the fact is they got to their fabulous new heights by doing nothing more than re-arranging the rules and calling it intellectual property, which is why the rest of us are still at the same old grinding stone eating a lot more grit.
I'll be interested to read about the productivity debate, because I would guess that is one way to focus on these absurdities, i.e. trying to make it real producing what?
Chuck Grimes