[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/4/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course we also need to start saying "an end to artificial scarcity" or
> "post-artificial scarcity."  That is part of why I think abundance is a much
> more useful term.  Abundance is about capacity.  The rest is supply and
> demand...and rights.  If we have abundant means to produce something, the
> rest is inevitable.  But this is not abundant capacity--the ability to
> download a tract of knowledge, code or art owned by someone else.

If abundance is capacity in the sense of technical capacity to produce
at low or no cost, IMO that's clearly wrong, at least insofar as the
abundance is usable or realizable by the average person.  Artificial
scarcity is about the use of artificial property rights and privilege
to make abundance less usable, to control access to it, and thereby
the holders of artificial property rights to capitalize it as a source
of rents.  It doesn't matter how much zero-cost abundance a Star Trek
replicator makes technically or physically possible, if someone has an
effective and enforceable grant of privilege from the state which
enables him to monopolize access to the replicators and charge what
the market will bear, or if the state creates a "property" in the
right to make and sell certain things and treats the making of those
things through the replicator as "theft."

To put things in the language you use below, artificial scarcity is a
fact.  It is real.  It exists.  When the technical means of abundance
exist because of the Star Trek replicator, but I have to work an
artificially high number of hours to pay for stuff because the state
restricts the terms on which the replicators can be used, then the
output of the replicators is artificially scarce and expensive.   When
a man builds a fence around an oasis in the desert and charges $100
for what would otherwise be free, then artificial scarcity exists as
an objective, quantifiable, physical fact, "as real as houses."

And in fact most of the hours we work go toward paying prices for
things that have nothing to do with the cost of producing them, so
that we work a majority of our hour on the job paying rents to the
owners of artificial property rights.  In that sense, most of the time
we work is the same in kind (if not degree) to slavery, and exists
only because the state has created a particular legal framework.  And
that legal framework was not created by the state as representative of
"society."  It was created by the state as representative of a
particular institutional  structure of power, which exists to benefit
some at the expense of others.

But I do agree that abundance is about capacity, if the definition of
capacity is expanded to include the sense which you explicitly reject
above.  Abundance is about the *total* capacity made possible by
technological advancement, including technological advances that make
artificial scarcity unenforceable.

That is
> taking.  Taking is stealing.

We disagree about as fundamentally here as it is possible for human
beings to disagree.  Taking my example above, by your standards the
person who uses the Star Trek replicator to make free food for his own
consumption is "stealing," if the state has granted ADM and Cargill a
"property" in the right to sell food at whatever price they set.  But
IMO the actual moral state of affairs is the direct contrary:  I have
a right to feed myself using my own tangible property in any way I see
fit, and to share the food I produce with anyone I see fit.  And the
people at Cargill and ADM, or the people who monopolize access to
proprietary replicators, are thieves who deserve nothing but hatred
and contemptuous defiance of their despicable false "property rights."

Stealing is a fact.  Property is a fact.
> Intellectual property exists.  The whole world--legal and rights
> world--agrees.  It would truly be a fringe POV to say IP is not real.  Such
> views can only hurt the Foundation and P2P advocacy in general.

I think you're conflating different senses of the word "real" here.
A couple of sayings are relevant:

Boswell:  Do you believe in infant baptism, sir?
Johnson:  Believe in it?  Why, I've seen it!

The Universe:  "You exist.  However your existence creates no sense of
obligation on my part."

> If that is where we are headed, it crosses a clear and bright line for me.
> I am strongly and completely against taking something without official
> (state) approval.  Individuals who take from other individuals against their
> will are simply stealing.  And states have, in my opinion, the full right to
> stipulate the laws and regulations protecting information, art, knowledge,
> etc.  If we don't like the rules, we should work to change them and to
> provide alternatives.  We should not violate laws.

Again, I think we disagree as far as it is humanly possible to
disagree on the moral authority of states.

Consider the implications of your statement of principles.  Do
landless peasants, or peasants working on insufficient land, because
of the state's feudal property rules, have a moral obligation not to
squat on vacant land that sits on a latifundio or hacienda without
paying rent to a feudal oligarch?  Did the state which stipulated such
laws and regulations do so as an agent for "society," which somehow
"decided" that that was in the "general interest"?   Is a vagrant
morally bound not to sleep under a bridge because the law, in its
magnificent equality, prohibits rich and poor alike from doing so (the
state, of course, reflecting the "consensus" of "society," not the
interests of the rich)?

Of course there is a
> moral point at which one is called upon to reject social rules--if commanded
> to commit genocide, etc.  Being asked to not copy a piece of code is not
> such a moral dilemma.  People who cannot distinguish the two really are not
> capable discussing morality in reasonable terms in my view.  A categorical
> rejection of IP as "existing" is completely anti-social.

I believe IP is completely anti-social.  And slavery, although the
most extreme case and the most morally repugnant on a visceral level,
is paradigmatic of all artificial property rights.   Artificial
property, including slavery, is all of a kind, if differing vastly in
degree.   To the extent that someone else's "property" right enables
someone else to live off my labor, to that extent the law is immoral
and should be trampled underfoot.  A law which prohibits the copying
of code exists, for its primary purpose, so that someone will have to
work ten or twenty hours to buy a proprietary CD of Windows instead of
a free copy; that law, in its essence, is the use of coercion to
enable one person to live by skimming off the surplus from the labor
of another; in that sense, it is in the same qualitative category as
slavery.


> There is no future wherein I see the rights of individuals extending to
> taking something from others that they do not wish to be taken.

I agree.  If I physically invade someone's spact and take a paper
manuscript or a floppy disc from someone's desk, or erase a textfile
from their  hard drive, so that they no longer possess their original
copy, then I have done a great injustice.

But if the "something" is a state conferred monopoly on the right to
perform some act, then I don't perceive engaging in that act, on my
own land using my own physical property, to be "taking" anything from
them at all, unless the meaning of "taking something" be stretched to
the point of meaninglessness.

Rather, a person who stops me from using my tangible property in the
way I choose, because he has the state-conferred "right" to a monopoly
on performing that action, is taking something from ME.

If that is
> the meaning of post or ending artificial scarcity, I am thoroughly against
> it.  As to discussions of DRM, etc. I think I have made myself clear: I
> believe "market" forces are moving toward free.  That will continue.  To the
> extent that DRM systems work within laws and are chosen by consumers who
> have reasonable access to free alternatives, I support them.

To the extent that the state prohibits the circulation of DRM-free
versions of any form of content against the will of the content
"owner," and coercively enforces that prohibition, by definition there
isn't reasonable access to free alternatives.  To the extent that DRM
systems work within laws, to that very same extent there can be no
reasonable access to free alternatives.  The framework of laws that
enables DRM is, by definition, a restriction of reasonable access to
free alternatives.

Technical means of circumventing DRM and distributing "pirated"
content are, themselves, one of the market forces by which proprietary
is made to compete with free.

> I appreciate the anarchist movement has taken a position of ambiguity and
> indiference toward the legitimacy of states now and in the future.  I cannot
> disagree more fundamentally with that view.  I find it destructive, hurtful
> and ultimately evil.  Others are certainly welcome to disagree.  Those are
> my views.

I respect you immensely, Ryan, and recognize that neither of us will
likely ever convince the other on this issue.  I do have to  say, by
the way, that my view of the legitimacy of states is neither ambiguous
nor indifferent ;).

I find the state destructive, hurtful, and evil.  To the extent
legitimate functions are performed by the state, they're functions
that would be carried out anyway by voluntary means in a stateless
society, and have been coopted or crowded out by the state in all the
ways that Kropotkin described in his historical account of the rise
and function of the state.  To the extent that the state enforces
rules that are necessary, or that are morally neutral but useful (e.g.
driving on the right hand side of the road, yielding the right of way
at a 4-way stop, etc.), it is simply replicating the kinds of
autonomous social rules that would spring up in civil society.  The
only things the state does qua state, that couldn't be done without a
state, involve zero-sum relations and the coercive extraction of
value.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html