I’ve just about finished reading Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, the follow up to their philosophical blockbuster Empire. The gist of the two volumes is two old marxists trying to make sense of where the world is heading in an era of post-communist globalization.
What’s impressing me as I finish up the second volume is this: “the common.” When I lived in New England I learned what “the commons” is. It’s a park in the in the middle of town that used to be free for anyone (or their cattle) to use but is now a public park. In Boston, it’s where you go for big protests or to meet gubernatorial candidates. In Salem, it’s where thousands of drunk people rabble around in costumes every Halloween (highly recommended, by the way).
Buried in the old concept of “the commons” is the notion that some things ought to belong to everyone. The bad thing about commons is that once somebody tries to take unfair advantage of the privilege, everyone else jumps in to make sure they get their fair share. Before too long, the commons is an overtrampled mess nobody wants anyway.
Hardt and Negri see a new commons, which they call “the common” (no “s”) to distinguish one idea from the other. They’ve noticed that in the 21st century economy, the cutting edge of labor is “immaterial.” Think service, tech, marketing, and infotainment. These areas are where the growth is, but in contrast to the industrial era, no widgets are produced that you can run off an assembly line. It’s all about the creation and manipulation of ideas and emotions. Hence, immaterial labor.
The danger is that the powers-that-be will end up controlling all of the products of immaterial labor through careful manipulation of copyright and patent law. Know why people don’t sing “happy birthday” in tv shows or movies? Because royalties would be owned the the folks who own the rights. Originally, things were supposed to slip into public domain (“the commons”) after so long. But the years before that can happen keep growing and growing.
But there are encouraging signs all around that “the common” is growing. The most successful anti-Microsoft advocates are gaining by simply building around the monopoly with open source software—everything from operating systems (Linux) to browers (Firefox) to office suites (OpenOffice). With enough time and attention, these free, community-built programs—that no one, legally, can own—will be viable options to the Microsoft monopoly. If you’re brave and tech savvy, all you need to pay for is the hardware. In time, the software should be good enough for even the most intimidated newbie to use.
In science quarters, groups like BIOS are working with an open source approach to biology. This is a direct counter to agribusiness corporations starting to sell genetically engineered crop seeds that only last one season. So that next season, you can’t use seeds gleaned from last year’s crops—you’ll have to go back to the agribusiness corp for this year’s variety. And the same goes for groups working to do open source genetics, hopefully working around the trend of trying to patent genetic finds for commerical gain. (They’d like to own the human genome, after all.)
Culture producers can turn to the Creative Commons to “copyleft” their original creations. (MyIrony uses the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.) There are enough license options with CC to please almost any content creator, and picking one out is numbingly easy. Wired issued a CD last year with several tracks of copylefted music—a symbolic gesture to be sure. But as awareness of copylefting grows, it should become more popular (and hopefully more expected).
The newest example I’ve run into is new “social software” that’s designed to make your library and CD collections (and maybe even your power tools) available for your neighbors to check out over the web. Let’s say you need a chainsaw for a weekend project, but you don’t really want to put out the cash to buy something you’ll probably never use again. If this idea catches on, you could search for people in your housing addition who have one and see—online—if they’re willing to lend it to you and under what conditions. A critical mass is definitely necessary for this to work, but if it caught on, it would certainly cut down on my trips to Home Depot and Borders. And give me an excuse to get to know neighbors I probably have stuff in common with anyway but just haven’t met yet.
All this is to say that Hardt and Negri see a battle between an open source “common” and a licensed, patented, and copyrighted everything. Two different approaches to immaterial labor. Time will tell how it plays out, but the good news is that advocates of the common have more (and easier) options than they’ve ever had before.
