Category: Philosophy

Capitalism does not innovate, because innovation is risky, whereas rent-seeking and financialization are profitable and mostly guaranteed-safe. Even when it doesn't choose rent-seeking and financialization, capitalism will choose to pander to the obvious gaps in the market that are easy to satisfy, or take existing desires and use advertisement to give them concrete referents in the world of products. And in all these cases, it will aim for the common denominator desires to satisfy, the ones with the widest appeal, because that is what best guarantees profits. I.e. it regresses to the mean.

Who does innovate, then? Only individuals or very small groups of individuals, who are motivated for intrinsic reasons around a common set of goals and values. Only people like that innovate, and that's usually orthogonal to capitalism at best – what those people most often want is a stable income to pay their bills and feed their families while they work toward their passion; they're not interested in "striking it rich" except insofar as it will help that goal. There are a few greedy exceptions, like Steve Jobs, but always behind them is another innovator who does it for intrinsic reasons, like Alan Kay.

Sometimes capitalism can provided the context for this kind of innovation, like with Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. But other times it's the government, like with SRI, SAIL, the MIT AI Lab, and CERN. What's important is a stable means of supporting yourself and your loved ones, and an environment of free intellectual play and experimentation, and a visionary set of common goals or interests. These can be created anywhere.

Author's note: the historical references found herein are meant to be general and impressionistic. I am intentionally simplifying and linearizing this narrative to make a point about how the representation media for ideas effects the nature of the noosphere-economy, not to make any historical point. I have linked to relevant respectable sources for each historical thing so that you can go learn the real history in all its proper complexity if you are interested.

The noosphere is the world created by human cognition: where ideas are born, grow, develop, are shared, split, merge, multiply, and sometimes die. It is emergent from and dependent on the physical world, deeply shaped by it, and also deeply effects the physical world, but it is also conceptually its own thing, having some of its own properties and laws.

A key feature of the noosphere is that while it is not free to create the things that exist there (ideas) because it takes time and effort to do so, once they are created, they are not scarce, nor rivalrous: they can be shared indefinitely and will not run out, and someone getting an idea from you does not take it away from you. When you communicate an idea to someone, you do not lose that idea and have to go back to the "idea factory" to make a new one or a copy of the old one – you and the person you shared it with now both have that idea. And if that person goes on to share that idea with other people, that is no burden on you; infinite copies of your idea can spread with near-zero cost to you.

Now, it may be argued that if someone "steals" an idea from you, you do actually lose something. Not the idea itself, but some credit, or opportunities like sales, that you might otherwise have gotten. However, I think conceptualizing these things as properly your possessions is actually an error in reasoning. Someone stealing an idea from you can't take away past credit you've received – awards, accolades, the knowledge in the heads of all the people that already knew you came up with the idea – and it also can't take away past sales or opportunities that you got as a result of the idea, because ostensibly you've already taken advantage of those. Instead, what they're "taking" from you when they copy an idea of yours is possible future credit – on the part of people freshly introduced to the idea – and possible future opportunities – such as future sales from people looking to buy something adhering to your idea.

The problem is that I don't think one can be coherently said to "possess" future possibilities.

First of all, they inhere in other people's actions and thoughts, not in anything you concretely have (by have I mean the usufruct definition, as usual in my work, of regular use, occupancy, or literal physical possession). I think it's wrong to give any person any sort of enforceable rights over the actions and thoughts of others that don't materially, concretely, effect them in some way – which, since they don't effect your own possessions, they don't. By saying that you have some sort of right over future credit or opportunities, you're saying that you have a claim on other people's future thoughts and resources – a right to control them!

This line of thinking is also confused, secondly but perhaps more importantly, because those future possibilities were only that: possibilities. Things you think you might have gotten. But any number of other things could have gotten in the way of that: maybe the idea isn't as good as you though it was; maybe a competitor with a different idea would've arisen; maybe you would've gotten sick and not been able to carry it out to completion. Even the person who copied your idea being successful isn't an indication that you would've been successful with that idea: maybe your execution wouldn't have been right in just the right way to catch people's imaginations and interests. Maybe your competitor was actually the right hands for the idea. So attempting to enforce your claim on such future "possessions" is attempting to enforce your claim on an ephemeral future thing which you might not have gotten anyway.

As a result, I don't think there's any coherent way in which it can be said that an idea is meaningfully "stolen." It's certainly terrible to see an original creator languishing in obscurity while an idiotic copycat with none of their original genius strikes it rich, and we should use all the social mechanisms – including ridicule, perhaps especially ridicule, because those who can't even come up with their own ideas are very worthy of it – available to us to rectify such situations. We should make giving credit to original creators a strong social norm. But in the end, ideas are non rivalrous. They can't be stolen, they can only be spread.

Already, I believe this to be a radically liberatory thing: the ability to share knowledge, ideas, discoveries, with anyone, infinitely – to spread them around, so that everyone has access to them, is a wonderful thing. Knowledge is power, as the old saying goes, and the freedom of ideas radically lowers the bar for accessing that power. The fact that a sufficiently-motivated person can get a college level education in anything through the internet, the fact that radical literature and ideas and history can spread through it, the fact that anyone can share their ideas and beliefs through it, these are incredible things.

I'm no idealist – material power is needed too – but at least we can have one world where there need be no push and pull, no worry about allocating resources, no necessity to divvy things up and decide who gets what and who doesn't. Everyone can have their fill of ideas, of knowledge, and there will be infinitely more to spare.

The noosphere has the best potential of any human realm to reach post-scarcity anarchy. Trying to bind this up, to turn ideas into property that only some can have and share, and then to use that monopoly on ideas to limit access to them, is to reproduce the hierarchies of the material world in the world of the mind – perhaps inevitable as long as we have hierarchies here in the physical world from whence the noosphere arises, but it is something that should be fought, rejected as a sad degradation of what the noosphere could be. Yes, a creator not getting the future benefits we would like them to get is horrible, and we should do something to rectify it, but destroying the radical power of a liberated noosphere is not the answer to that problem.

There is a catch to this, though. In order to share ideas, you have to transmit them somehow. That's nearly free in one on one conversations, but that's slow and exclusive – costly and scarce in its own way. Before the invention of writing, that's standing on the street corner or in the town hall spending actual hours of labor far in excess of a simple one on one conversation reproducing the idea for people to hear, or teaching in schools, or preaching in places of worship, or being a wandering teacher of various kinds. All of these require at least labor, and often physical material as well, that must be paid with each marginal increase in the amount of transmission of the idea. Moreover, actually turning the noosphere from a few shallow disconnected tide pools at the edge of a vast sandy beach by virtue of geography into an interconnected network was vastly expensive to do, involving costly and time consuming physical travel. Some would do this for free, realizing the potential of the noosphere in the truest form they could, but people have to eat, so often a price was asked for this dissemination of knowledge. Plus the time, labor, and material costs involved kept the spread of the noosphere slow and difficult. Thus, for most of history, while the noosphere had the potential to be post-scarcity, in its practical application it was not.

Then, in 3,400 B.C., came writing. Writing allowed someone to express, or even teach, an idea once, and then all that needed to be done after that was to pass around that book. It radically reduced the costs of disseminating ideas, bringing the noosphere even closer to its ideal. It still wasn't there yet, though: books could degrade over time through use, and if you've given a book to one person, that means another person can't have it. As a result, the dissemination of ideas was still limited, expensive, and rare, and thus ideas were de facto scarce. So more was needed.

The monastical institution of copying certain books en masse that arose in 517 B.C. was another improvement. While before books had been copied ad hoc in earlier ages by those who had access to them and happened to want another copy, now books were intentionally copied many times through a factory-like division of labor and rote performance of tasks. As a result the marginal cost of transmitting ideas became much lower, because the cost of creating a written representation that could infinitely transmit the same idea without further work by the author was much lower, and such representations were more plentiful. Scriptoriums created many copies for low work, and then each copy transmitted an idea many times with no extra work, and at the same time as each other. (We will see this recursive dissemination structure later.) Nevertheless, not enough of these could be created by this method to bring down the price in labor and scarcity by much, so focus was placed on making the copies beautiful through illumination, and the were preserved for a lucky few. Ideas were still scarce, even at this stage.

The natural extension of the scriptorium was the printing press, invented in 1455: now, the copying of books could be done by machine, instead of by hand. Infinitely faster and cheaper, suddenly knowledge could be spread far and wide for a relatively cheap sum. First books, then newspapers, then pamphlets and zines. As printing technology got more advanced and mass production printing was figured out, things got cheaper and cheaper. Now ideas could be disseminated for a few cents at most, and then the representation of those ideas was durable enough to be disseminated from there too. However, the longer and more complex the idea was, the more it cost, and if it was really long and complex and extensive, it could still be prohibitively expensive for other people. Additionally, it was impossible for the average person who got a representation of an idea to reproduce it further for others in a meaningful way – you can't perform mitosis on books. And getting ideas to widely different locations was still time consuming, expensive, and difficult. Ideas were still not yet free.

Then came 1989 and the World Wide Web, and with it, a total paradigm shift. Whereas before each individual transmissions (in the case of teaching) or representations that can perform transmissions (in the case of books) of an idea costed labor, time, and/or material, now individual transmissions and representations of ideas, in the form of bits, were just as reproducible, just as non-rivalrous, as ideas themselves. Instead, the cost was in infrastructure, as well as in bandwidth: a mostly up front, or fixed and recurring, cost for the capability to transmit, not each transmission or reproduction itself, and one which scaled incredibly slowly with the amount of representations of ideas disseminated, making individual ideas essentially free. The fundamental asymmetry between ideas and the representations needed to spread them was beginning to break down.

Even more game-changingly, even the bandwidth problem could be solved through the post-scarcity and non-rivalrous nature of the digital noosphere. Every download of information from one location creates a copy of it essentially for free (post-scarcity), and that can be done infinitely without losing the information (non-rivalrous), and furthermore each person who downloads information can themselves disseminate the information infinitely, and those people can in turn do so, recursively (unlike books). No one person needs to bear much of the cost at all for the total dissemination of an idea!

Another fundamental structural difference to the noosphere that the advent of the World Wide Web enacted was that geography suddenly mattered far less: once infrastructure was established once between two locations, geography no longer mattered: communication was nearly as cheap, and nearly as instantaneous, in comparison to the cost and time lag it had had before, with someone across the globe as it was with someone next door. The noosphere was no longer tide pools that a few brave crabs managed to scrabble out of and move between, but a vast information ocean.

Not only that, but the very ideas that could be disseminated changed: once enough bandwidth was built, audio and video could now be disseminated, meaning better reproductions of ideas and reproductions of ideas that would have been difficult to disseminate before. Still later, interactive information became possible, with things like Java Applets, Flash, and eventually JavaScript, making the better dissemination of knowledge and ideas through teaching programs and interactive notebooks, and the dissemination of still more novel ideas, possible. Once, film, music, interactive teaching, and performance art were not ideas, but concrete products, or performances – the world wide web made them part of the noosphere. Once, you could only get transcripts of a lecture, not see a great teacher performing it.

All this information could suddenly be created and shared much, much faster than before – almost instantly – allowing the dissemination of ideas in real-time, to individual audiences or broadcast to many, as cheaply and easily as the dissemination of any other idea. Actual discussions, with all the back and forth, the detail, the texture, and the interactivity of conversations could happen across the entire world, and be preserved for future generations to read.

Ideas could also be spread, and received, anonymously or pseudonymously, depending on your preferences. Social inequality, prejudice, bigotry, ostracism, mob bullying, and exclusion didn't disappear, but suddenly they depended on a person intentionally choosing to make aspects of themselves known and to maintain a consistent identity. They were still a problem, but one that was less baked into the system.

I cannot begin to overstate the revolutionary potential of the noosphere so liberated. It had the potential to be a world where the barrier to entry for obtaining and disseminating knowledge, ideas, and experiences was radically lowered, and the marginal cost nearly zero. Where people could freely communicate, think, learn, and share, become educated and empowered.

There were dark sides, of course. With that radically lowered barrier to entry, fascinating new ideas, creative works, remixes of existing ideas, and radical texts, that would not have been widely available, or available at all, became instantly and globally available for sharing; but so did an endless sea of garbage. With access to all that information, some could educate themselves, and some could find alternative facts and "do their own research."

Is trying to dictate who can share ideas, and what ideas can be shared, through centralized, bureaucratic, highly status-oriented, elite institutions, really the right solution to those problems, though? Those who would find alternative facts and "do their own research" today would likely have been equally dismissive of what came out of centralized, "legitimate" institutions, equally likely to substitute their own beliefs for reality, to pick things up from hearsay and what their Uncle Bob told them while he was drunk at thanksgiving and ranting about the out-of-towners. The things they pick up in the digitized noosphere are just cover for their existing predilections.

More, there's no reason to think that whatever institutions happen to have power and legitimacy in our society will always necessarily be systemically more factual, less propagandistic, less blinkered, and less manipulative – they will just be so in service of the status quo, and so their problems less evident, and the status quo can change for the worse. In this historically contingent situation our institutions are better than much of what is shared in most of the noosphere, but relying on that to always be the case is dangerous – and they're only better as far as we know. When will the next revolution in thinking happen? Where will it start?

Instead of trying to relieve people of the burden of thinking by filtering their information for them like a mother penguin chewing a baby's food for it before vomiting the sludge into its mouth, we need to systemically and societally to get to people first, before their introduction into the wider noosphere, so we can provide people better tools and support networks to shoulder the responsibility of thinking for themselves. This should be the responsibility of parental figures and communities.

Finally, the radical, liberatory, empowering, potential of the noosphere made free by the world wide web is, in my opinion, well worth having to try to figure out how to mitigate the risks.

The problem, however, is that the system is afraid of the noosphere. Thus it introduced the framework of intellectual property to pin it down, so that some could be given "exclusive rights" – monopolies – to certain ideas or pieces of knowledge. The system has always justified this in terms of protecting and benefiting the producers of ideas by giving them first-mover advantage, but the system always ultimately serves the interests of the rich and powerful. So as much as small artists may cling to the notion of copyright, for instance, should they ever have their work stolen by anyone, they won't have the money to go to court and actually do anything about it; meanwhile, the mega-corporations and mega-wealthy who run our society can steal with impunity and there's nothing anyone can do about it, while cracking down harshly on any imitation and iteration on their own work. Even though imitation of and iteration on ancient work is the lifeblood of art and science throughout history, the absurd logic of copyright has been expanded inexorably throughout modern western history.

And this has been extended to the noosphere itself, smashing many of the radical, liberatory possibilities it held within it, leaving us with the worst of both worlds: much of the revolutionary potential of a digitized noosphere crushed under the weight of intellectual property while the mirror image dark consequences of the noosphere run totally unchecked, because it is not profitable to check them. In fact, the hate engagement is very lucrative.

It's worse than that, though: information wants to be free – because digital representations of ideas can be infinitely copied and disseminated by default extremely easily, because copying is the very nature of how computers work and how networks transmit things, it isn't enough to lock the only copy of the representation of an idea in some lock box somewhere and only give a copy to those who pay for it, confident that they couldn't produce more representations to give away for free to all their neighbors on their own, and even if they did it would be easy to notice and shut down. Instead, an entire perpetually metastasizing surveillance and control system must be created to make sure copyright isn't violated – things like Denuvo and DRM – stealing trust and control from people to rub salt in the wound of the destroyed potential of a digital noosphere.

(Moreover, with the increasing migration of people away from decentralized services – because the cost of individual autonomy is personal responsibility and choice, and that is too high an asking-price for many part-time vacationers in the noosphere – centralized gatekeeping institutions for the dissemination of facts and information are being formed ad hoc and for profit, but that's out of scope for this essay.)

If we want to bring the noosphere to its full potential, we must put a stop to this, and that can only be done by recognizing some principles:

1. Once you put an idea out in public – or its representation in digital form, since it is economically identical – you do not have the right to control what other people do with it, because what they do with it does not harm you or take anything away from you or require any marginal labor or time from you, and controlling what they do with it is domination of what they do with their own minds and bodies.
2. Copying, imitation, and iteration on existing ideas is a fundamental part of knowledge production. Without the ability to pull from a commons of free flowing, up to date, interesting ideas, art and knowledge production will wither.
3. Since the digital noosphere is a non-scarce economy where once one puts out an economic unit (in this case, an idea) it can be infinitely and freely shared with anyone, one cannot put a price on an idea, or the digital representation of an idea, itself. One can put a price on the performance of an idea, or a material representation, or on the production of further ideas that you might otherwise withhold, though.
4. Copyright law has never, and will never, actually serve artists. It is a tool to be used against them, and for censorship.
5. Anonymity is important and should be preserved as much as possible.
6. Mirror things you like, to make bandwidth less of a cost in disseminating ideas.
7. The digital noosphere must be seen as:
   1. a gift economy in the sharing and creation of new ideas: this means that ideas are shared freely in the expectation that improvements of them, iterations of them, or new ideas will be shared in return, and also in return for credit – which, while not a right, should be strongly encouraged by social norm – which can be transformed into reputation, and from there into material compensation, if needed, through things like Patreon and Kofi;
   2. and an economy centered around a huge shared commons of existing resources: this means that all shared ideas go into the commons, and, to protect this communal wealth from extraction and exploitation, where the communal labor and wealth is enjoyed but not contributed to, iterations and modifications of ideas from the commons must also be part of the commons.

These principles are why I license all of my work as Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0: such licenses are not legally enforceable, but they represent an informal contract between me and my readers, as to what they can expect from me, and what I would like to see from them: attribution, and contribution of any derived work to the commons in the same manner that I contributed my work to the commons, are what I expect from them, and in return I will allow them to copy, redistribute, modify, and make derived works based on my work as much as they like. I know this won't make a change systemically – I don't know how we can, in the face of "those weary giants of flesh and steel" – but that's my small part to play.

I also don't think the right to restrict the use of your work once you've publicly released it should exist, so using a license that uses the copyright system against itself, to disable it by forcing any derived works to go into the commons – where they belong – seems ethical to me: I'm only restricting people's ability to dominate others and steal from the commons, not to exercise autonomy. Don't confuse domination for an exercise of autonomy.

And tonight, when I dream it will be
That the junkies spent all the drug money on
Community gardens and collective housing

And the punk kids who moved in the ghetto
Have started meeting their neighbors besides the angry ones
With the yards
That their friends and their dogs have been puking and shitting on

And the anarchists have started
Filling potholes, collecting garbage
To prove we don't need governments to do these things
And I'll wake up, burning Time's Square as we sing
"Throw your hands in the air 'cause property is robbery!"

– Proudhon in Manhatten, Wingnut Dishwashers Union

Many leftists seem to have this idea that there will be one glorious moment, a flash in the pan, where we have a Revolution, and the old system is overturned so that we can construct a new system in its place. Some believe we can't do anything but wait, study, and "raise consciousness" until, then, while others try to take useful, but limited, action of some kind in the meantime, like fighting back against fascism or various other forms of activism.

The problem with this idea is that, as flawed as our current system is, many people depend on it, often desperately and intimately and very legitimately, with no clear way to do without it. Yes these needs served by the system could be provided-for in other ways; if that weren't possible, then overturning the system would be wrong. However, the presence of the system, providing for those needs, and often explicitly shutting out and excluding other means of providing for them, as well as propagandizing us against even thinking of still other means, have ensured that those new systems we envision are not in place, and our muscles for constructing them are atrophied.

Thus, if the system were to be overturned overnight in some glorious Revolution, there would not be celebration in the streets, there would not be bacchanals in honor of the revolutionaries. There would be chaos and destitution, the weeping and nashing of teeth, the wearing of sackcloth and ashes, even as the glorious Marxist-Leninist-Maoists scolded those mourning for mourning an exploitative system.

What can we do, then? This system must be overturned – or, at least, we must struggle toward that end – so how do we avoid this outcome?

The key is to build our own system in the interstices of the old one. Each of us must go out and try to create some part of the system we would like to see, according to our expertise – if you're a doctor, practice medicine for your friends outside the traditional healthcare system, inasmuch as you can; if you're a programmer like me, build systems for your friends to use that exist outside the software-industrial complex; if you're an academic, steal the papers and ideas you're exposed to and make them available for others, give impromptu classes; no matter who you are, take part in making and distributing food and resources if you can, however you can; take part in skill-shares; call each other instead of the police and mediate your own disputes; protect each other – perhaps institute a rotating duty of protection for group events; in short: do what you can, according to your skills and abilities, to provide for those immediately around you, an alternative to the system. Don't just "organize" for activism or to fight fascists. Organize to actually provide useful services. Organize to fill potholes!¹

The next step is to slowly grow whatever practice or service or community event you've started so it can serve more people, and so that more people can get involved and help. Do this according to whatever ideas about organization you have – I'm not here to talk about that component of it. But the important part is to to do it. Don't focus on growth at all costs; make sure to maintain the original spirit, purpose, and values of the thing; don't let legibility, acceptability, and so on corrupt what it is; and don't let it grow beyond whatever its natural size is. But let it grow. And when it reaches the point past which you don't think it should grow anymore, try to encourage the creation of similar systems, the following of similar practices, in other places far and wide, on the basis of your practical experience. Maybe, if you can afford it, travel, and plant those seeds yourself. Then network those growing trees together, so that they can aid each other in times of need.

Remember, the point is to provide things people need. Not to grow for its own sake. Not to "do leftism" – so it shouldn't even be overtly ideological, or overtly targetted at leftists, or anything like that, and it should especially not exist purely in political domains, to fight political battles – but to do something people need done.

If we do this, then if the system is ever toppled, we'll be ready: we'll have built things that actually have a shot of taking over from the old system and providing for people. There will be horrible growing pains to be sure – shortages, bad organization, unprepaired networks, what have you – but at least there will be something there. More, we'll have practiced, grown experienced, actually learned how to be adults and do the things we wanted take over from the system, instead of just demanding them be done, but not learning how to do them. Even better, we'll have had time to experiment with all the different ideas and ideologies around organizing, and figured out which ones work and which don't, which are more successful, and which aren't.

In fact, if we do this right, there may not even be a need for us to initiate a "Revolution" against the system. In my ideal vision of a "revolution" against the system, we just continue building our alternatives, providing for more and more people, and in the process purchasing investment and buy-in from them in our ideas and in our systems and networks and organization, building good will and loyalty with them, until finally our alternative systems threaten the system as it exists enough – as the Black Panthers did – that the system descends upon us to throttle us. And maybe, hopefully, we'll be strong and numerous and self-sufficient enough to resist, and have enough love and good will and investment, from all the people we help, that we'll be able to make it a public relations disaster for the powers that be to grind us beneath their heel, and they'll be forced to withdraw and let us live our new, free lives in peace.

And hey, if the revolution doesn't work out? At least we helped some people.