Jan 09
28
Practising Digital Anarchy
Academics are really important to the commercial sector.
Their visions for how the future is going to unfold drives inventions and innovation. A huge part of the R&D that finds its way into the general marketplace has its initial genesis in the labs of the universities around the world.
Similarly the ideas that shape the legislative process invariably come into being in the philosophy, law, and arts faculties of universities.
So while some businesses may think that academia is out of touch, others realize that the memes that emerge from universities today are important predictors of what the societal vectors of tomorrow will look like. The force of change in the copyright industry is typified by Creative Commons licensing – regardless of the fact that Lawrence Lessig may be somewhat vague on some of his theories. The truth is that Lessig started the movement; he doesn't have to be both its architect and its builder.
Now at UCLA there is some radical thought in the area of social revolution. Have a read of the Digital Humanities Manifesto, authored with the university with some fairly heavy hitting names playing key roles:
Here are some quotes from the document if you don't have the inclination to click through to the site:
Digital
humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices
that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or
the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.
Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the
digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated
a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while
vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards
into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the
digital become its core.
The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the
vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second
wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It
immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core
strength of the Humanities: complexity.
Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity
are empty words unless they imply changes in language, practice,
method, and output.
The digital is the realm of the open: open source,
open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space
should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.
Yes, there is something utopian at the core of
digital humanities: The open, the unfixed, the contingent, the
infinite, the expansive, the no place.
Copyright and IP standards must, accordingly, be
freed from the stranglehold of Capital. Pirate and pervert Disney
materials on such a massive scale that Disney will have to sue… your
entire neighborhood, school, or country. Practice digital anarchy by
creatively undermining copyright and mashing up media.
There is a lot more, but think about it for a moment….
If you buy my premise that what is being thought about at universities today becomes part of the broad base of society tomorrow, and you have a centre of thought suggesting that everyone in every neighbourhood should stand up to industrial copyright protection and practice digital anarchy, what does that tell you about the way the the copyright industries are going to have to work in the future….? Not, I might add, to mobilize the copyright police, but to put in place a much more inclusive and visionare business model that enables copyrights to do what they do quite naturally – to travel digitally with the minimum friction.
Future business models obviously need to reward copyright owners and creators. But they need to do so in such a way as to reduce financial and logistics friction.