A2K Symposium: How Fractal Inequality Challenges the Unity of A2K
posted by Frank Pasquale
The edited collection Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property is an extraordinary achievement. Many essays offer models of engaged scholarship. The book as a whole reminded me of what Ian Shapiro described as problem-driven (rather than method-driven) scholarship. Shapiro argues for the superiority of “problem-driven over method-driven approaches to the study of politics,” making “the case for starting with a problem in the world, next coming to grips with previous attempts that have been made to study it, and then defining the research task by reference to the value added.” He argues that “method-driven research leads to self-serving construction of problems, misuse of data in various ways, and related pathologies summed up in the old adage that if the only tool you have is a hammer everything around you starts to look like a nail.”
Problem-Driven Research
By contrast, problem-driven work tries to reason about a puzzle, injustice, or inequality, by drawing on the full range of methodological resources developed by social scientists. Krikorian and Kapczynski welcome the perspectives of health workers, activists, social critics, and academics. All the contributors think critically about access to knowledge, unshackled from disciplinary blinders that can lead to what C. Wright Mills calls “abstracted empiricism.”
The A2K paradigm addresses a very large issue: access to knowledge writ large. For A2K activists and academics, there are common problems besetting individuals in both the developed and developing world, who all find themselves hemmed in by patent, trademark, and copyright laws. As the introduction puts it,
In a hospital in South Korea, leukemia patients are expelled as untreatable because a multinational drug company refuses to lower the price of a life-saving drug. Thousands of miles away, a U.S. group called the Rational Response Squad is forced by the threat of a copyright lawsuit to take down a YouTube video criticizing the paranormalist Uri Geller. Could we—should we—see these two events, so seemingly remote from one another, as related? Yes—or such is the premise of a new political formation on the global stage, one that goes under the name of the “access to knowledge movement”—or more simply, A2K.
A2K is an emerging mobilization that includes software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in South Africa, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to “defend the digital commons”—to select just a few. A2K can also be seen as an emerging set of theoretical commitments that both respond to and reject the key justifications for “intellectual property” law and that seek to develop an alternative account of the operation and importance of information and knowledge, creativity and innovation in the contemporary world.
On the one hand, I find this type of parallel very appealing. We are in an era of globalization which tends to fragment the interests of labor across national, ethnic, and class lines. A2K envisions the unity of consumers. Given the shift from producerist to consumerist economic models, advocates need to develop a theory and practice of social justice from the user’s perspective. The old paradigm was a just wage; a new model of distributive ethics might instead focus on providing certain social minima, particularly those which can be copied at zero marginal cost.
Divergent Problems in the Developing and the Developed Worlds
Few should quarrel with efforts to provide knowledge-based goods for free (or very cheaply) to the world’s bottom two income quintiles. At present, that 40% of the world’s population can barely access more than one percent of global product. Their purchasing power is often exhausted by the provision of bare necessities. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, and while there is some evidence that charging a nominal amount for mosquito nets makes people value them more, you can’t have too many such initiatives in the developing world without ruining their ostensible beneficiaries. When it comes to educational supplies and medicines, there should be a norm of charging (if at all) based on “ability to pay.”
My only reservation about the terms of this tactical alliance arises out of my study of inequality and the digital labor movement described by Trebor Scholz. Many Silicon Valley gurus have declared that we live in an age of “free.” Artists are supposed to give away images of their paintings; writers are supposed to make everything they do available for free online; journalists are to be replaced by hordes of citizen reporters who describe events, as they see them, in their twitter feed. In an unfortunate metaphor deployed by one law professor, content is mere “paint” to be organized into “pictures” by the truly creative force of computer-driven aggregators and taste makers.
I am afraid that if the normalization of “free” is a goal of the access to knowledge movement, it may contribute to unfortunate background economic trends that could liquidate many knowledge workers. I am all for uncontrolled access to software, journalism, and any other product with zero marginal cost of copying, once the underlying social problem of providing food, shelter, transport, and healthcare has been solved for all those working in such fields. Until then, it makes a great deal more sense to me to tax the likes of John Paulson to help pay for access to drugs, news, and education in the developed world. In other words, if anyone has to give something up in order to promote access to knowledge in the developed world, the first to sacrifice should not be those scrabbling for a living as newspaper writers or designers.
Among the top 15,000 taxpayers in the US in 2005, the average tax return reported $26 million of income, and the “Fortunate 400”–the 400 households with the highest earnings in the U.S.–made on average $213.9 million apiece. (The cutoff for entry into this group was a $100 million income.). Taxing that group more fairly—and indeed anyone making over $250,000 a year—could create the type of economic security in the US that really lets creativity flourish. Just ask JK Rowling!
To conclude: I’m completely on board with the A2K agenda for the developing world. I also think the movement has a very important role to play in encouraging sequential innovation and the freedom of individuals to tinker in various cultural and technical contexts. I just worry about creative individuals and knowledge workers someday finding that social norms of “sharing,” “generosity,” and “compassion” leave them in the same disprivileged position that “unpaid laborers” in the home (most of them women) have suffered for centuries.
February 1, 2011 at 12:24 am
Posted in: Culture, Intellectual Property, Law and Inequality, Symposium (Access to Knowledge)
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Responses (8)
A.J. Sutter - February 1, 2011 at 10:37 am
Is it realistic to think that problem-oriented research will draw on “the full range of methodological resources developed by social scientists”? E.g., would you personally ever seriously use Chicago-style neoclassical analysis as just one tool among many? I expect that those drawn to problem-oriented research will have some advance preferences about which methodological resources they will use or, at least, about which they will leave aside. That’s both inevitable and fine — but one should probably ditch the hyperbolic “full.”
As for painter and paint, call me retro, but I think Walter Benjamin was onto something when he spoke about auras’n'such. I’m also wondering where privacy fits into the shift from “producerist to consumerist economic models” — am I supposed to live my life for the sake of people who want to know about me?
Frank Pasquale - February 1, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Let me take on the privacy question in a concrete context: the classroom. It’s more convenient for everyone to tape all the classes, and also can lead to wonderful opportunities to learn from iTunes U, Khan Academy, etc.
But for seminars, there are probably at least some students who will participate less because they know their comments will be recorded and possibly distributed.
Even for lectures, a professor may believe that the performance is meant to be watched as a whole–not to be broken down into, say, its most embarrassing (or even enlightening) parts. Jaron Lanier makes that point about his book, You Are Not a Gadget, and I’m now glad to have read the whole thing, rather than excerpts, though it took longer to comment on it (and it was, of course, more expensive).
So I think an educator has some right to prevent potential decontextualization of their work that can result from unauthorized surveillance. Would I give the same right to performers? Say, to a musician who doesn’t want her songs parodied and puts a shrinkwrap license on CD’s to prohibit buyers from doing so? I think one can draw a principled line between performances and recordings. The performance should remain a space of improvisation and spontaneity, and the privacy protections needed to keep it that way ought to be respected. But the authorized recording is presented to the world as a finished product, and I’d approach shrinkwrap restrictions on it with my usual skepticism about the desirability of wholly-privately-crafted IP rules. Perhaps also cyberspace is a different “place” than person-to-person interactions, an idea explored a bit here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=898260
A.J. Sutter - February 1, 2011 at 8:20 pm
I agree about the performance issued on CDs with the authorization of the performer, but that seems off-topic from privacy issues. The seminar example is more on point, the lecture one maybe less relevant, even though I agree with your conclusion — consider that USDA official who lost her job when a public speech was maliciously sliced and diced a while ago. (This example suggests I shouldn’t only be limiting the issue to privacy: there is also a right of personality a/k/a publicity.)
Nonetheless, the classroom context puts a conventional and perhaps optimistically narrow spin on the meaning of the K in ‘A2K’. My real point in asking about privacy was to find out: access to knowledge about what?
Frank Pasquale - February 1, 2011 at 9:14 pm
So let’s start with three hypotheticals that raise interesting questions about access to knowledge of what.
I think at one point we may have discussed the reception of Google Street view in Japan as opposed to in the United States where in Europe. For the A2K advocate, constant and ubiquitous Google mapping might seem like an unquestionably good thing. It gives everyone a chance to take a look at so many aspects of the world that they could never physically travel to. (We can bracket for the moment the possibility that this resource may eventually be commodified and offered on stratified terms.)
Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book on Google points out that in Japan the roving cameras of the street viewer were objected to. He emphasizes the need for the global company to respect divergent cultural conceptions of privacy.
In other spheres, it may ultimately depend on how much confidence we have in anonymization techniques. There are countless medical researchers who would love to have access to massive amounts of patient records (all stripped of personally identified information). But, as Paul ohm shows in his work “Broken Promises of Anonymization,” there is a real trade-off between privacy and access to the information.
It’s also intriguing to think about the relative value of studies based on OkCupid dating data, versus the possible risk to reputation that could result from untrammeled spread of a deanonymized version of that data. In an intensely private society, we might make it imperative to destroy all that data. A society obsessed with quantifying itself, understanding itself “scientifically” (or at least poring over those bits of data illuminated by the lampposts of constant internet monitoring of behavior) would more highly value the data’s release.
A.J. Sutter - February 2, 2011 at 6:46 am
Actually, that’s a great point you mention, about the belief in “scientific” self-understanding, which also seems pertinent to your other two examples. To what extent does that “scientific” worldview animate the information politics of A2K? (Assuming, BTW, that it’s appropriate to speak of A2K monolithically — if there are, say, scientistic and humanistic wings of the movement, that would be interesting to hear, too.)
A.J. Sutter - February 2, 2011 at 10:44 am
BTW, apropos of the last point mentioned in your post, namely how are people going to make a living: another contributor to this symposium, Philippe Aigrain, has an interesting talk viewable online, entitled “The Commons as a challenge for classical economic patterns,” that is directly apposite.
Amy Kapczynski - February 2, 2011 at 11:32 am
Great post, Frank. You point to two important concerns – that free information won’t be *enough* to meet broader goals of justice, freedom, equality, and that free information against a background of cavernous material inequality may in fact make things worse. I think the first would be uncontroversial in A2K circles (though A2K types can be criticized for failing to say this often enough), and the latter points at what might be a kind of faultline, or maybe a place of ferment, in A2K.
I talk about these issues in a section called “is information different enough?” in my intro to the A2K book, (http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/189095196Xchap1.pdf). And point to a few places where people in the A2K world are trying to think about them too (see the Benkler and Verzola articles in the book, for example). They suggest, I think, that the different qualities of information generate *relatively* more freedom, equality, possibilities for justice, and that this can redound to the material world.
There are also recent attempts to link the thinking of A2K folks to the broader commons movement (see http://p2pfoundation.net/Berlin_Commons_Conference), which has a politics far beyond information/knowledge. But this question of how to characterize the conjuncture between material and immaterial remains one of the most important questions for the A2K movement, and very much unresolved.
One more thought — one of the things that A2K suggests is that freedom in the material realm (say, a basic income) will *also* not be enough under the conditions of contemporary informationalism. So, as I discuss in my intro, access to medicines campaigners in fact campaign against corporate donations of medicines and in favor of generic competition, because of the unaccountability and “charitable” nature of the former. (They also support free medicines provided by the state, but think that these must be generic to be sustainable.) All of this also may show some suspicion of the state (and statism) in A2K, and that “free” in this context is associated, contra Stallman, with both beer and liberty…
Frank - February 2, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Thank you, Amy, for this response. I’ll be sure to consider your work on this question and the other parts of the book that you recommend. I see your point about a basic income not being enough under conditions of informationalism. I also think there is immense value in creating some spheres of totally “free creation,” as Niva Elkin-Koren noted in her critique of creative commons, and A2K advocates are much more aware of those than the types of alternatives I referenced in my post.
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