Rents, oil, copyright and the suicide of Aaron Swartz

[Cain]

Give this a read, please

http://symbalitics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/aaron-swartz-blood-for-oil.html

In the post-war era, one can define the "post-modern" problem as the point where production of information undermines information monopolies, this includes money, religion, and academia. This leads, in Marxist and Marxian thought to the continental movement now labelled "post-structuralism," the work of Derrida, Lacan, and others. On the right it leads to fundamentalist movements and traditionalism. Both left and right assert what I will label the "neo thesis." The neo-thesis states that the early 20th century was a disruption, that it is impossible to return to the time before it directly, but, largely agreeing with Hayek, that the disruption can be returned to by re-asserting a social control. What Derrida calls "the game itself," is the means to return to a Pre-World War II normalcy. Hence, a neo- world, where movements assert a three fold argument: the present is corrupt, the solution is to return to some imagined better moment, and the means is by having some particular ideology as the primary one which rules over others. Thus fights, even over small disagreements, become brutal, because the are a fight over the very most basic rules of social participation, the "other" is alien, not merely in disagreement.

However this ideological framework is not dominant for randomly or because of its intrinsic aesthetic appeal. It grew up because the reality is that control of a few key pieces of capital, knowledge, and resource, dominate over all the others. It was Derrida who quipped that two things would never be viritual: oil and Jerusalem, everyone wants the real thing. In this he encapsulated the problem: control over the keys to the mechanized economy and control over the brand equity of the "game itself" are the basis of all power, and since power is needed to maintain the benefits of the present, the basis of present society.

Enter Intellectual Property, and the role of academia. The West had two important rents: one is the path dependency of finance, which the very nature of the oilarchies could not easily duplicate, and the other was the path dependency of knowledge creation, which the oilarchies did not want to duplicate.

Thus part of the drive to create streams of income, was to propertize information, at the same time, cut the oil cost of its storage and transmission. These two goals are in fundamental contradiction: knowledge, the more it is digitized, and internetworked, acts less and less like property, and more and more like heat. It diffuses.

This is what bothered people who dealt with this system. Viewed in terms of the marginal, that is capital, cost, a copy costs almost nothing, and enough copies, and the value is enormous. At the same time that information became more important, the value of creation dropped to almost zero. The value of a song writer is less than zero: most musicians spend more on the tools to make music, than they earn. Rent has a value, thus a brand name musician, who is easy to find, is worth a million hits for nothing.

Academia is part of the path dependent rental advantage of the US, and as such, its price rose through the roof, going up by far more than inflation for the last 30 years.

It is this connection: the need to create rents to say ahead of the ability of low stake holder resource billionaires, that made IP and Academia behave like rents. The problem is that while academia does, indeed use rents all the time, for example, naming mathematical theorums after the creator, scientific laws after the discoverer, footnoting and textual apparatus, these rents are difficult to impossible to monetize directly. Academic rent created the drive to larger and larger administrative systems, and more and more power being given to people who controlled the money flow. With every passing year, there was the need to squeeze larger rents.

All in all it's quite brilliant, and links together two things I had never connected before (the role of oil in the global economy and the role of IP in academia)

[LMNO]

That's a really interesting take on things, although I did have to read it over a few times before I got the meaning.  Was that poorly written, or have I really been out of academia for that long?

Anyway, the concepts of neo-thesis and it's nostalgia, and the monetization of control (or, control of monetization) really resonate in this situation.

[Golden Applesauce]

I think I understand the article. By "rents", he means the power to compel someone else to regularly pay you, as in the landowner has rents against the farmers who must pay him to be able to grow their crops on his land? So controlling oil controls a "rent" that every industrialized society needs to pay, because industry needs oil the same way farmers need land. But land-renting farmers only exist up to the point where the landowner has acquired enough wealth/power to just replace his renters with slaves/indentured servants/illegal immigrants/whatever. To avoid that end game, the Western strategy is to come up with stuff that oil countries need just as much as we need oil - high finance, science/engineering know-how, media/culture, [military intervention.] But those things are different from oil in that they have super low marginal costs of production, so without specific policies to keep them hyper-profitable (ignoring security fraud and laundering money for drug cartels, highly-subsidized loans to keep education expensive and IP rights to restrict access to past publications, [actively creating military crises in and around oil states]) we'd end up racing each other to the bottom and not charging enough for those services to put the same economic pressure on oil states that they put on us.

Basically, we need monopolies of our own, because otherwise foreign monopolies will buy up all of our other businesses piecemeal. If Goldman-Sachs and Google don't increase in value faster than Dubai gains purchasing power - if we pay the oil companies enough money for them to turn around and buy all of our sources of revenue that don't depend on oil - we're fucked forever.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That was very interesting, and opened my eyes to a perspective I hadn't considered, which is that my decision to dive into academia is not at all dissimilar from a ghetto kid trying to make it into the big leagues. Sure, the odds are better for me,  and the payoff is smaller, but fundamentally what I'm doing is hoping that my entry into the system, at a cost of maybe forty thousand dollars if I'm lucky, will put me in a position where I can be the primary investigator on original research, and that information, with my name on it, will ensure that I continue to draw an income and remain in a position to create more original research with my name on it.

I'm basically the same as a tall kid with a good jump.