Ray,
This is really important. It is something I have wrestled with in the
book. The whole basis for political legitimacy in the industrial age is
property - at first land and latterly machines and buildings. Economists
and lawyers have tried to deal with the issue you raise by creating the
concept of intellectual property and trying to throw around it the same
fences as they did around physical property to protect exclusive use by
defined owners. With the Internet, this cannot work. Once an idea or
intellectual work is on the Net there is no legal or physical fence that
you can throw around it. The only thing you can own in the old fashioned
Lockeian sense is the means of distribution of the information - the
hardware of the Net. In my view, the entire Lockeian political theory that
underlies modern politics and the modern conception of the state falls down
because of this.
In one sense, it is therefore possible to say that everything on the Net is
art - like this listserve and our conversations :-)
Looked at another way, the Net is the (intellectual) Commons of our time,
but unlike the Commons of 17th century England, you can't eject the
villeins, freemen and cottagers from it and put fences around it to keep
them out.
Mike
>
>But this raises another issue for me on this list. Why is it that
>whenever you guys and gals
>talk about work you "basically" are still talking 19th century
>manufacturing "hired hands" or "commodities" labor instead of the 18th
>and now late 20th century "intellectual project oriented skills"?
>
>Is this an issue still of the bias towards "real estate" as the only true
>capital base? I would dispute this considering that until recently
>America's largest and most profitable export was arts and entertainment
>(movies) that is purely intellectual capital or maybe more accurately
>"virtual capital." Of course the movies have the highest labor costs,
>along with professional sports of any profession in the country. I
>think the theoretical base for this amongst economists thus far is pretty
>shoddy and old fashioned. Talk to me.
>
>REH
