dessalles

Been trying to learn about capital-P-Property and how its use as an economic & legal framework for information production has left us wading through a hazy muck of copyright and intellectual property law. Ew. My oversimplified understanding of the problem is this: you can’t a have a system of ownership for infinitely reproducible digital information and expect to reap the privileges of ownership exercised with physical goods. Put another way, in the digital world, ownership and possession are no longer synonymous. That is, one simply needs to possess information to reproduce it (see file sharing) - ownership is irrelevant. In Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, Durrell Bishop explores this rift by giving digital information a physical container…

Nothing terribly profound there, but I found the thought experiment valuable in furthering my understanding of these concepts. Bishop is basically trying to reintroduce opportunities to possess digital information in a physical way that imparts some amount of ownership. He’s backtracking through the technological advances that eliminated the need for things like compact discs. And as the RIAA and MPAA know all to well, once a physical object isn’t required to access digital information, protecting copyright on that information becomes basically impossible.

I started thinking more thoroughly about digital fabricators over the weekend, and doing so while trying to wrap my head around all this property nonsense, I started considering the fairly massive economic implications associated with the impending ubiquity of desktop fabbers. It’s sorta obvious that the concept of property doesn’t exactly go hand-in-hand with digital information - great. But what cheap and easy digital fabrication would do is extend those same incompatibilities to physical objects. Possessing a digital model of an object is all that’s needed to fabricate it - once again ownership affords nothing. That’s an all-around game changer. Music and movies have only been around in their current form for little over a century, so digital piracy on that front doesn’t really change all that much. But humans have been pretty much selling material goods the same way for THOUSANDS of years. The only difference between now and then is a little industrialization and long-distance transportation. And while I find the prospect of housewares manufacturers uniting with the RIAA to battle digital piracy entirely amusing, wouldn’t the former’s entry into the fight pretty much herald the demise of supply-demand economics? I’m no Adam Smith, but isn’t that, like, what our flat-world, wal-mart economy is all about? Or was that only in Econ 101? Whatever; if it means Ikea will eventually be replaced BitTorrent and a fabricator in my living room, I’m all for it.

As I do anytime I forecast a global economic disaster, the first thing I did after coming to this realization is search the internet to see whose already written about it. No surprise, Bruce Sterling, theorist of all things fab, was all over this future back in 2004:

In theory, an ultrasophisticated molecular-assembly fab could make amazing things - say, a diamond-encased iPod. But never mind the high end; the low end is more interesting. Desktop manufacturing brings the digital revolution into the domain of everyday things. Where once there were objects, now there are well, fabjects.

[…] Now imagine a vast, rising tide of bastardized things, shoddier than the cheapest postwar products of Japan, coming from Congo, Myanmar, Fallujah - a global outbreak of Napster-fabbed mayhem. Fabbing would be the ultimate industry for the perennially unindustrialized; the consumer cornucopia for the antideveloping world; a mushroom patch of recycled decay that pops up whenever the World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, or US Patent and Trademark Office turns its back.

Cornucopias are awesome.