Rethinking Our Resource Taxonomy

At the endpoint of our last discussion, we came to the conclusion that if was necessary to sort out the assumptions involved in classifying resources into the categories of Natural, Technological, and Cultural. In particular, we need to figure out how our ideas about access and enclosure might change depending on what sort of resource we are addressing. In order to set up a foundation for further inquiry, here are a few points that have already come up and some initial questions that emerge:

1. Taking from Walter Benjamin’s notions about the nature of science and technology, as well as more recently-codified notions of envirotech, we want to approach technology as a relationship between humans and nature. This idea presents us with a potential nexus between natural and technological resources which may complicate our understanding of exactly what types of resources are being accessed or enclosed in certain instances (i.e., privatized water infrastructure).

2. In other instances, the boundary between technological and cultural resources seems similarly complex. For example, when DRM applied to an audio file, the process of enclosure is being practically applied across a spectrum of technologies (hardware, software, media file) that manage a relationship between a song and a listener. The ultimate object of enclosure is both a cultural resource (a song) and a technological resource (an audio file).

3. In both of the prior instances, there seems to be a tension arising between the task of addressing technology as an intermediary between people and some other resouces and the task of addressing technology as a resource in its own right.

4. When addressing points 1 and 2, do we understand technology’s work in managing the relationship between person and natural resource the same way that we understand it’s work in managing the relationship between person and a cultural resouce? In essence, this is to ask whether we have some assumptions about some sort of fundamental public rights of access to natural and/or cultural resources.

4a. Almost certainly, notions of auteurship will feature prominently in tracing the different sets of “rights” as related to these two types of resources. Do we imagine that cultural resources are produced though processes that grant their creators some sort of monopoly – economic or otherwise – over their use (as copyright suggests)? If so, where do we locate the limits of those monopolies and what entities or institutions should codify those limits?

5. On this note, we want to make sure to interrogate the notion that Cultural and Technological resources can be grouped together as “artificial” (i.e., human-made) in opposition to Natural resources.

Def.: Envirotech

I wanted to introduce this term as a shorthand for expressing the relationship between nature and technology discussed in the two previous posts. The term was invented by a work-group of scholars in the history of technology and environmental history, see “what is envirotech?” here.

Intersection of Nature and Technology, again, from Walter Benjamin to Virtual Water

Your previous post was so inspiring that I had to respond in a fuller form than the comments.

On the one hand, there are several recent trends that point in the direction Arthur is talking about – e.g. all the recent news about switching our medical records over to all-digital, “paperless” billing for telelphone, cable, bank and utilities customers, etc. There is a sense in which, at least informationally, we are moving more and more to an all-digital environment, where the digital version feels like “the original” and all physical, analogue manifestations like a printout feel like copies. It’s worthwhile, even if his ecological argument is worthless, to reflect on some of the historical trends he identifies.

On the other hand, your critique based on the very analog energy and natural resource costs required to operate the ever-expanding global network of digital (i.e. electronic) devices hits Arthur’s argument where it hurts. This really gets me interested as a historian of technology. I’m very inspired by the idea, once expressed by Walter Benjamin in One Way Street, that although “the mastery of nature is, so the imperialists teach, the purpose of all technology…technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man” (Reflections, p. 93).

Science and Technology: these two words describe the relationship between humans and our natural environment – what do we know about that environment? how do we use, manipulate and impact that environment? Every human production requires consumption. Producing mechanical or electrical power, for example, always requires the use of some preexisting natural material or force–sun, water, wind, wood, coal, gas, oil, etc. Technological systems like our electric power grid never function – cannot function – without appropriate inputs of human effort (work, use, maintenance) and inputs of natural forces or resources. Science (broadly, the production of knowledge about nature) works the same way. This formula (human-tech-nature) works equally well for describing the water mill grinding grain, Pasteur observing bacteria under the microscope, or a network of cellphones spreading over the globe like Starbucks (or propagating like rabbits, if you like).

You found this little nugget of Benjaminian wisdom lurking behind Arthur’s argument. It can be found hiding in almost any pat techno-determinist narrative like Arthur’s. And it’s going to be an important nugget to keep in mind as we try to make even stronger ties between our analysis of natural resources and technological resources.

When we think about technological and cultural resources, we need to seek the hidden natural resources behind them. So for example, John Allan of King’s College London, an expert on the water economy of the Middle East, coined the term “virtual water” (AKA embedded water, embodied water or hidden water) to mean the amount of water required to produce any given good or service. In this same vein, we could ask: how much virtual coal do we burn in each blog post? As you argued, this is what Arthur misses.

Energy and the Intersection of Natural and Technological Resources

Following up on the topic of peak oil that I brought up in the comments yesterday, I wanted to comment on what I think is a somewhat short-sighted Guardian blog post by Charles Arthur. The thrust of Arthur’s argument is that the rising price of oil combined with with the falling cost of internet connectivity will create a future where the analog world cedes more and more to the digital.

If you need a shorthand for thinking about the future, then, it’s this: analogue will be increasingly expensive; digital will be increasingly cheap. Getting in a car or on a train or a plane? Analogue. Expensive. Non-renewable. By contrast, downloading an album, watching a webcast concert, watching TV: digital. Endlessly replicable, virtually instantly transmitted, cheap.

What, in turn, does that mean for our society? Apart from fewer cars on the roads (though possibly with more people sharing rides in them), it means more time working at or near to home, if your work involves things that can be done digitally. For all those jobs that need to be near to physical things – that is, where you make things like cars or food or whatever – you’ll have to be based nearer the place you work.

Of course, this line of thinking begs the question of exactly how Arthur thinks this ever-expanding digital infrastructure will be powered? The same fossil fuels that are used to power cars and planes are needed not only to run the infrastructure that exists, but to create all the physical pieces of that comprise it, both in terms of the actual production process (running the machines that make the machines) and as raw materials (i.e., every piece of plasic involved). Presumably he did not read the 2008 Harper’s piece on Google’s energy consumption.

Of course, to the extent that solar energy technology becomes more prevalent, it seems difficult to imagine how that particular natural resource could be privatized, even though the requisite technologies could still be proprietary.

Technology Bill of Rights

Dovetailing perfectly with our discussion about the various modes of governance in relation to fair use, BoingBoing liked today to a Technology Bill of Rights drafted by Paul Venezia.

The six articles his lists address issues of liability for bugs in closed source software, the need for limitations on DRM, net neurality and anonymity, and so on. It’s a good thought piece in its own right, but particularly interesting here as we consider the various forms of authority that might be brought to bear on the privitization of technological resources. The idea that Venezia promotes here is that emerging world of digital technology and social interaction requires a codified set of universal rights for users, in particular to intercede in the imposition of (in this case, commercial or corporate) tyrrany. To quote Venezia:

The impetus for the creation of the Bill of Rights was the tyranny of the rulers in Britain and its effect on the colonies. As with much of human history, it takes a significant problem to cause the creation of a significant change to society. We may be nearing that point right now, and the time may soon be right for another Bill of Rights — one centered around technology.

Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, my sense is that the “significant problem” he’s referring to is the lack of corporate accountability inherrent in the wholesale privitization of the digital realm. It might be really useful to consider a comparison between this notion of technological rights and the development of labor regulation and unionization. In the latter, the notions of workers’ rights to fair wages, a safe workplace, etc. conflicted with free market notions of corporations’ (and supposedly workers’) rights to freely negotiate the terms of employment: if the poor laborer “wants” to work for peanuts, and the company wants to pay that much, who is the government to intervene? One could very easily see the same argument coming up in the contemprary technological debate: if the tech company wants to sell a product laden with proprietary, buggy software and the consumer agrees (at least implicitly though a EULA) to buy it that way, who’s to stop them? Indeed, this libertarian tone is prominent in the comments on Venezia’s post.

On a side note, perhaps Venezia should consider including an article regarding the retroactive disabling of tech functionality, such as in the case of the text-to-speech function on the Kindle that we discussed in an earlier post.

Introduction to Water Wars

Here are some public, usable resources for reading up on the current global water crisis:

Wikipedia on Water Privatization (scroll down for lots of extra sources and links)

Steven Jackson’s nice book review of literature on the Global Water Crisis from Technology and Culture, a leading history of technology journal.

And of course, my current guide to all things Global Water Crisis, Fred Pearce‘s fast-moving survey of global water problems, When The Rivers Run Dry.

Sociologist Erik Swyngedouw has written abour water resource management in Equador, arguing that flows of water are flows of power, too.

Award-winning documentary FLOW (For the Love of Water)

Kimberly Fitch recently wrote a dissertation on recent water privatization trends in France and Germany (see abstract here).

Recent collection of essays on water privatization in South Africa, entitled “The Age of Commodity.”

Recent argumentative essay on Water Privatization by Matthias Finger and Jérémy Allouche.

This only scratches the surface. There is a huge literature out there which I am just beginning to master! Happy reading.

Def.: Water Wars

SourceWatch.org defines Water wars as:

Water wars is a phrase used to describe increased competition for water resources, due to drought, climate change, or increasing populations; controversies over and reduced access due to privatization of water services; or the role of these tensions in leading to physical conflicts, within or among nations.

Who Owns Woody Allen?

Woody Allen visits his own likeness in Spain

The New York Times reported today that American Apparel has settled a lawsuit with Woody Allen (to the tune of a cool $5,000,000) over the use of a still of Allen in traditional Hassidic dress from Annie Hall (1977).

Two things interest me about this:

(1) What exactly was wrong with using the still from the movie? Is the idea that Woody Allen owns his face, his film, or something else? Allen himself was quoted as saying that use of the image was “sleazy” and “infantile.” Was there something antisemitic, here, perhaps? The moral charges from the prosecution aren’t clear, especially as reported by the Times.

(2) Dov Charney, CEO of American Apparel, claims he only settled because his insurance company told him it would be best, and that he doesn’t regret using the image at all: “I’m not sorry for expressing myself.” His defense appealed notably to principles of free speech and fair use.

So whose side should we take, the corporate CEO who sticks up for the right to recycle existing images to produce innovative advertisements, or the crotchety old actor-director playing the copyright cop? Charney’s defense sounds fairly self-interested, as if he’s exploiting free speech and fair use. Allen, on the other hand, made a flabby yet tight-fisted defense based on a rather conservative interpretation of property law. How does this compare with, say, the episode in 2005 when Nike pirated the iconic cover of the Minor Threat discography?

Finally, it’s worth noting that this settlement put an end to a media circus which has been going on for a while, already. The Times wrote:

“The settlement brought to an end an episode that pitted controversial figures from the fields of film and fashion against each other in a highly public fashion.”

Including: Charney being slapped with sexual harrassement charges that frankly smack a bit of Allen’s own career, Charney’s defense calling a number of Allen’s past lovers as character witnesses to smear him, and an uncomfortable statement from Charney saying that he identified with Allen because they “had both been the subject of unfair media-driven scandals.”

Amidst all the sleaze, Charney makes a good point, and that puts me in a strange bind intellectually. On the one hand, I feel compelled to defend the value of free speech and fair use. But if corporations can appropriate culture as simply as individuals can, then we should probably judge each particular case of appropriation on its own. In the end, this farcical lawsuit reveals a key question: who appropriates what, for what reasons, in what contexts?

Is Allen just being an oportunist, evoking property law only when he dislikes the appropriation and not – as with the statue above – when he likes it? Is this a fair weather property defense? Is Charney abusing high-minded ideals in order to defend a more base quest for profit? What do we make of this mess?

Best Practices for Fair Use

American University’s Center for Social Media has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video [PDF]. This is one in an extensive series of fair use guidelines documents.

There were a few of interesting things I noted about these guidelines. One of them was that the panel generally broke with mythical notions of isolated auteurship and instead recognized the unbroken tradition of appropriation in the production of culture. For another, these guidelines specifically recognize recombinance and juxtaposition as a valid form of expression in itself. The authors note that appropriation should be covered by fair use standards in cases where, “QUOTING [is employed] IN ORDER TO RECOMBINE ELEMENTS TO MAKE A NEW WORK THAT DEPENDS FOR ITS MEANING ON (OFTEN UNLIKELY) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE ELEMENTS.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is a notion stated explicitly in the video accompanying the written guide: that determining the boundaries of fair use is more an issue of determining community standards than it is a question of interpreting the letter of the law.

Much like the question posed in our last post about where we can locate the lower horizon for proprietary concepts (as distinct from the non-ownable background of fundamental processes and tools), we trying here to find the upper horizon for how much of officially proprietary cultural content can be appropriated without restriction for the purposes of cultural expression and dialogue.

The argument here is that the process for locating these horizons must incorporate an investigation into the changing standards of the multiple, overlapping communities (geographical, virtual, artistic, economic, etc.) where the appropriation is happening. And these investigations should not simply be conducted by corporate content owners and legislative bodies for the purposes of “knowing thy enemy”, but rather for the purpose of determing whether the legal horizons for fair use are being applied appropriately in relation to the horizons established by these communities.

A Fundament of Tools, Materials, and Processes

In a blog post about copyrighting knitting patterns (which is also saved in our del.icio.us library), author Sunni lays our a very simple and eloquent treatise on a fundamental problem with the ownership of creative processes. Though I am not comfortable with the site’s overall approach to issues of “individualism and freedom,” I do think her thoughts on this particular subject are worth repeating here:

When a pattern is so straightforward that it contains only basic concepts such as “hat–ness” and the two fundamental knitting stitches, how can it be anyone’s property? If any newish knitter can devise the same pattern for creating an object, how can any designer prove that “her” idea has been stolen? It’s the same problem as arises sometimes in cooking: a fundament of tools, materials, and processes exist, and have been used for millennia to create items people enjoy. Trying to stuff those things into the current context of ideas as property simply does not work.