I was looking into Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism recently for a paper that I’m working on and was interested in a quote by Marx about the idea of a commodity: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
When something is interacted with as a commodity, it is assigned an abstract value that shares a common denominator with other commodities. Two things may have nothing at all in common until an exchange value is assigned to them. What do an eggplant and your labor have in common? They can both be bought and sold. Now that everything seems to be a commodity, I find it interesting that people are deliberately producing value items that are not commodities. They are creating them and distributing them for free. This undermines their exchange rate. I suppose someone is getting paid somewhere along the line, though I’m not really sure how or at what point along the creation-consumption pipeline. Is this all really so free and loose, or is there some underlying commodity market hiding under the cyber-surface?
One thing I think is true is that neither Marx nor any capitalist ever imagined that people would create valuable stuff for free. This is a new type of revolution that seems to undermine, or at least significantly challenge, the current economic system. Thoreau said “Enjoy the land but own it not.” (Walden) This can be said of intellectual property, too. On the other hand, I realize that I’m a total hypocrite. I own many little bits of property that make me feel secure. I would be uncomfortable if my ownership of them were challenged. Maybe the whole 2.0 property paradigm will have to settle on me over time.
I think that the main difference between physical property and 2.0 property is that much of the information that goes into making virtual objects comes from the environment. It’s a commentary on the state of the world. Human capital is put into it in the form of labor in different ways than with physical objects, and the end result is a different type of thing. Maybe that’s why it should be interacted with in a different way; as a different type of commodity. And maybe the new capital is your personal relevance and collaboration ability. You don’t want to squander it by being disagreeable, so you have to cultivate it through social interaction.
Anyway, here’s an interesting web site that I found and want to share: It’s a place that you can go to find open source equivalents to name brand products. http://www.osalt.com/
One reply on “Challenging Property & Ownership”
Hi Greg, I really like where you’re going with this post. I would say that the relentless march of commodification has either mutated or been circumvented in a certain way with digital information.
Because info is not conserved as with eggplants and labor (if I send you a file, we both have copies of it), this makes ownership and value a lot murkier. How can I ‘steal’ valuable data if the ‘owner’ still has it? I suppose then the economics of an information society focus on ‘access’ to data and subsequently software more-so than possession.
I really like the line of thought you have with regrads to the ‘new capital’ cultivated through social interaction although for reasons merely academic I’m uncomfortable calling it ‘capital’, i.e. it implies an inevitable commodification of the social sphere. Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational (http://ow.ly/5Ty6C) covers this in his behavioral economics analyses by separating ‘market norms’ and ‘social norms’. With social norms, cultivating a relationship is the reward unto itself and the material gains, if any are ‘fuzzy’. With the market, however, he writes “you get what you pay for”.
The ‘means of production’ are a lot more accessible and the barriers to entry, say writing my own programs or self-publishing a book I wrote are much lower thanks to the Internet. So if folks are producing things of value and giving it away, it’s because it’s more personally fulfilling to reach a wider audience and have an impact than to control and charge for access. As soon as you begin getting paid for something you like to do, making it ‘work’ and not ‘play’, the motivation for doing it changes. I think ‘getting paid’ in social capital is a common occurrence in online communities as ‘reputation’.