A critique of information exceptionalism

A contribution excerpted from J. Martin Pedersen:

“The philosophical problems inherent in “information exceptionalism” and their consequences for Free Software and Free Culture politics result in a very important recursive relation being absent, namely with the tangible realm. The Free Software movement is “vitally concerned” with copyright reform and abolition of software patents, but they are not vitally concerned with substantial reforms of property relations in the tangible realm, on the contrary. The material foundations of cyberspace – and thus the realm in which software development takes place – is certainly part of the infrastructure that allows Free Software to come into being in the first place. Without a critical approach to ownership in the tangible realm the Free Software movement will remain vulnerable to enclosure led by those capital interests.

The most important commons is the commons of the land and the tangible means of production and distribution. That is the shared material reality of humanity from which all other possibilities arise, whether tangible or intangible. The information commons is a luxury, the icing on the cake. It is costly and it is precious and has excelled in perpetuating the seemingly ubiquitous propensity of human beings to engage in sharing and cooperation when constraints are lifted. The liquid architecture of cyberspace has facilitated these emergent processes very well. But the proliferation of sharing and cooperating, which attracts so much attention – from rent seekers and anti-capitalists alike – is not confined to cyberspace, nor to the intangible realm.

The difference between tangible and intangible is not what determines whether people share and cooperate. As we have seen there is a long, rich history of commoning. Commoning is a shared skill of humanity and not a skill that suddenly, morphogenetically appeared on a global scale when the doors to cyberspace were opened. Rather, cyberspace provided people with a space that was not yet enclosed. There were few fences in cyberspace, so sharing and cooperating was possible. It was possible because the constraints of private property – present in almost all other dimensions of life – were absent. Now they are invading cyberspace, seeking rent and expansion of capital interest. It is laudable to form a movement to strike back and protect cyberspace, but a more reflexive approach would not stop at the gates of the tangible realm. The threats of capital will not go away as long as capital exists in its particular form. It will return, it will continue to seek new ways of enclosure, which suggests that it is necessary to address this problem of capital at the most fundamental level, namely with regards to ownership.

Addressing merely the symptoms of avarice and capital expansion in the intangible realm condemns Free Culture to an eternal and defensive battle and separates Free Software and Free Culture from the global movement of movements struggling to take back the land and the means of production. Without acknowledging and acting upon its recursive relationship to the tangible realm, Free Software remains a virtual commons that is detached from the struggles for real commons. Having witnessed the phenomenal emergence of commoning in cyberspace – when the constraints of private property were lifted – we can only imagine what transformations the tangible realm would undergo if constraints were lifted there. As I said above, the opposition here is not tangible versus intangible, but private property versus forms of property that facilitate collective creativity and self-organisation.

Nevertheless, the achievements of the Free Software movement are remarkable. It is in the GPL that these achievements are manifest.”

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.