Siva Vaidhyanathans series of essays on openDemocracy.net presents an engaging view of a world on the cusp of deep cultural change. He considers peer-to-peer networks as the focus of global transformation, and examines the tensions between the established system and the rise of decentralised networks as symptoms of greater evolution in the emergence of new socio-political systems.
Vaidhyanathans suggestion that p2p may have implications for social change far beyond its roots in music-sharing, and that this may be the true reason behind the extreme outrage against Napster and its successors, is thought-provoking. But his argument is weakened by the tendency to revert to stereotype and cliché. By framing his series around the words anarchist and oligarch, Vaidhyanathan risks contributing towards greater entrenchment of the opposition between the entertainment industry and fair use advocates.
The beauty of diversity
Most people, asked to offer a list of associations from the root word anarchist, are likely to mention terrorist and violent alongside protestor. An experiment with the words oligarch, globalisation and libertarian would have similarly negative results. Vaidhyanathans essays are peppered with these words. The traps of loose language and populist rhetoric mar his analysis and divert attention from the deeper dynamic that may be at work in the development of peer-to-peer systems as I shall argue below.
For example, Vaidhyanathan states in the opening of his first paper that: The actors who are promoting information anarchy include libertarians, librarians, hackers, terrorists, religious zealots, and anti-globalisation activists. This could easily have been lifted directly out of the recent anti-p2p propaganda issued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in true 1940s-style.
What if the list were extended to include researchers, computer programmers, university professors, cryptographers, lawyers, analysts, oil company workers, bankers, teachers, and the enormous collective of musicians and artists united against their oppressive management? The beauty of the p2p phenomenon is that its demographic cuts across the boundaries of society a true picture of the universal freedom which Vaidhyanathan envisages in his decentralised world.
Breaking the chains of information feudalism
Yet having discouraged the use of labels, I now break my own rules and introduce a new term: information feudalism. In a book of the same name, Australian professor Peter Drahos suggests that the current push for increased control over intellectual property rights has bred a situation analogous to the feudal agricultural system of the medieval period. In effect, songwriters and scientists work for corporate feudal lords, licensing their own inventions in exchange for a living and the right to till the lands of the information society.
In this perspective, the capitalist worlds feudal lords the major record companies, publishers, and pharmaceutical companies exploit these workers and the creative products they bring to harvest. Through efforts to stop the advance of internet technology and to control and monitor free communication, todays equivalent of feudal lords resist the workers struggle towards liberation from the modern feudal system.
But what will happen if, by a natural process of invention and creativity, these creative workers begin to outgrow the feudal lords and to circumvent the very systems that society considers itself to be founded upon? Could this lead, as in earlier historical eras, to revolution (as in 19th century France) or to acceptance and synthesis (as in Europes Renaissance)?
The philosopher Fritjof Capra believes that the struggle we are experiencing is not as simplistic as the revolt of a group of anarchists against their oligarchic oppressors, but is one more deeply indicative of major civilisational change. Capra invokes Arnold Toynbees and Pitirim Sorokins analyses of the cyclical development of world cultures to argue that current tensions are part of a pattern repeated across centuries. He writes: As individuals, as a society, as a civilization, and as a planetary ecosystem, we are reaching the turning point.
For Capra, cultural transformations of this magnitude and depth cannot be prevented. They should not be opposed but, on the contrary, should be welcomed as the only escape from agony, collapse, or mummification. Perhaps we should be viewing p2p in this light. Instead of clinging to archaic and decaying business models we should, as Capra suggests, examine deeply the premises of our culture, discarding that which has not proved itself useful, and recognising and embracing new and emerging values.
Against an empire of fear
One symptom of the cycle of cultural death and rebirth is that people who have been prominent in the declining social world will seek to cling to their position through ever-increasing and often futile attempts at control of the forces of change. Michael Moore describes in Stupid White Men the leaders methods of control in George Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-four, words of eerie relevance in light of President Bushs war against terror and the introduction of the Patriot Act in the United States:
The Leader needed to have a permanent war. He needed to keep the citizens in perpetual fear of the enemy so they would give him all the power he desired. The people wanted to live, so they gave up their freedoms and their liberties. Of course, the only way this could happen is if they were truly convinced that the enemy was everywhere, anywhere, and that they could die at any moment. This mentality of fear is reflected in the assertions of world political and business leaders about, for example, the links asserted between p2p systems and terrorism, or the funding of terrorism a concept which is laughably ironic as p2p by its very nature is a non-profit system. Yet such implications are routinely aroused as part of the effort to control the spread of a system which threatens the very base of operation of these leaders.
They are right to worry, for non-linear systems of communication do present an alternative to the tiered hierarchy of capitalist regimes. But p2p itself does not seek to provoke change through the empty, smash-the-state methods of anarchism; that would be against its essentially viral character, as some insist upon describing it. Instead it quietly and gradually builds communities across physical borders, cultural boundaries and, crucially, systems of governmental or economic rule. After all, it was not the invention of Napster itself that caused an outcry the product launched calmly and was enjoyed initially by the few geeks who were aware of its existence. The fuss only happened when major record labels reacted to a perceived threat to their established means of controlling business.
P2p systems will play a crucial role in the evolution of the next major world culture. The language of anarchy used by Siva Vaidhyanathan, with its implication of being reactive not inventive, destroying the old not creating the new, cannot capture this broader dynamic. To take a Taoist view, the yang of the present system seeks its complement in yin, or non-linear systems where the new world evolves from within the hierarchical present, not by violent force but by quiet evolution.
