AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Commons, Speech, and the Right Thing

Doc links to a column by Arnold Kling, in which Kling makes the provocative claim that “Content is Crap.” Kling’s point is that Big Media publishing is necessary to filter the bottomless oceans of dreck and distribute the refined, pure water of worthy cultural productions to consumers. (I think his use of a water-treatment system metaphor is not accidental, here, and Doc would promptly rebuke Kling for identifying us consumers.)

Kling writes for an official tech publication, so his writing is, by definition, not crap (it’s already been filtered). Still, he gets a number of things wrong. First, I think, water treament plants usually don't reroute sewage to homes as drinking water; don’t they generally redistribute treated water (not “filtered”) to the ecosystem (back into lakes, rivers, and so on) where any residual impurity may be diluted and filtered before entering the drinking-water system?

Second, the Creative Commons is not (as Kling supposes) primarily about opportunities to self-publish; vanity presses have been with us always, and will continue to abound. The Creative Commons is about resisting the notion that our cultural work ought not be available. The Big Media model of copyright involves constructing and preserving an artificial scarcity of access to cultural work. Lessig and the Commons allow that some sort of artificial scarcity benefits all, since it establishes an interval in which those willing to pay for access to the work must reward the composer/writer/whatever for that access; the Commons stands against prolonging that artificial scarcity for a variety of reasons, but at least partly because whenever a social system rests on artifically-sustained premises, that system suffers from intrinsic weaknesses. that then require additional artifices to reinforce. All that artificial scarcity and security isn’t a market force—it’s a restriction on market forces and is designed to produce a particular outcome, in this case an outcome beneficial to Big Media.

In response, the Commons says that the market and the people are best served by minimizing the artificial overhead of shoring up scarcity, and permitting genuine market forces (what people will pay for “filtered” and packaged works, what the true costs of reproducing versions of the work might be) handle the rest. I’m looking out for my chance to go to a neighborhood bookseller and to buy a hard copy of a book I just read; I want the packaging and the benefits that go with it. That’s the Commons at work.

Third, Kling supposes that the Commons thinks of everything to which one might apply a license as “gold.” It would be easy enough for him to check that claim, without bandying about opprobrious characterizations of “naïve ideology” (indeed, that’s one of the things we hope for in a filtered medium such as the column of a professional journalist). Kling, however, flatly asserts what he could easily have found to be wrong. The Commons doesn’t presuppose anything about the quality of what is licensed; the Commons represents a commitment to making publicly available as much gold and as much dross as it can, and allowing readers, listeners, and even columnists to make use of it as they will. Of course, not all people are willing or capable of making fine distinctions—but that’s not the Commons’s problem, that’s a problem for editors.

[As a non-believer in “the market” and “market forces,” I have a hard time making this argument in public—but Kling’s cavalier representation of the Commons so irks me that I’m willing to sound like a genuine capitalist for a few moments. Now we return to our scheduled hippy-communal programming.]

Posted by AKMA at January 17, 2003 08:24 AM | TrackBack