The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (26 page)

The specter of nearly free genome research and just-as-cheap applications in the future makes the prospect of Commons management of scientific endeavors a very real option. Scientific papers and proposals on
Commons management of genetic research and applications are flooding social media spaces, and new Commons associations to manage genetic innovations are proliferating.

The push to open up the genetic Commons by a younger generation of scientists has forced the issue onto the public agenda. The growing popular support for sharing genetic information pressured the U.S. Supreme Court to partially reverse its earlier ruling granting patents on life. In June 2013 the court unanimously ruled that genes linked to breast cancer are discoveries of nature and not human inventions, thereby invalidating a patent on the genes issued to Myriad Genetics. The decision, although an important first step in reopening the genetic Commons, is not as significant as it might seem, because new cloning technologies that slightly modify naturally occurring genes are still held to be human inventions and therefore patentable, allowing biotech, pharmaceutical, and Life Science companies to continue to partially enclose the planet’s gene pool.

The rush to freely share the accumulating knowledge of the biology of the planet echoes a similar surge between 1992 and 2008 to freely share software, music, entertainment, and news when the plummeting marginal costs of generating information gave rise to open Commons like Linux, Wikipedia, Napster, and YouTube.

The Environmentalists and Software Hackers Become Kindred Spirits

The “free genetics” movement has run parallel to the “free software” movement for the past 30 years. They both champion the open sharing of information over conventional intellectual-property protection—and each faces formidable foes. The early leaders of the Free Software Movement realized that big media, the telecommunications industry, and the entertainment community would circle the wagons and do what it took to tighten up any holes in intellectual-property law that might provide an opening for the insurgency. Environmentalists faced a similar situation with the Life Science industry, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness.

While the dual movements shared common philosophical ground, they also began to share technological ground with the birth of the new field of bioinformatics. Researchers began using computing technology to decipher, download, catalog, store, and reconfigure genetic information, creating a new kind of genetic capital for the Bioindustrial Age. Computing and sophisticated software programs provided a new language for conceptualizing biology as well as an organizing medium to manage the flow of genetic information in a biotech economy. As I noted in my 1998 book,
The Biotech Century
, “Computational technologies and genetic technologies are fusing together into a powerful new technological reality.”
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Today, molecular biologists around the world are busily engaged in the most extensive data-collection project in history. In government, university,
and corporate laboratories, researchers are mapping and sequencing the entire genomes of creatures from the lowliest bacteria to human beings, with the goal of finding new ways of harnessing and exploiting genetic information for economic purposes.

By midcentury, molecular biologists hope to have downloaded and cataloged the genomes of tens of thousands of living organisms—a vast library containing the evolutionary blueprints of many of the microorganisms, plants, and animals that populate the Earth. The biological information being generated is so massive that it can only be managed by computers and stored electronically in thousands of databases around the world. For example, were the complete human sequence to be typed out in the form used in a telephone directory, it would take up the equivalent of 200 volumes of Manhattan’s thousand-page directory.
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That’s a database containing more than 3 billion entries. Taking the analogy one step further, if we were to print out the data on all human diversity, the database would be at least four orders of magnitude bigger—or 10,000 times the size of the first database.

Mapping and sequencing the genomes is just the beginning. Understanding and chronicling all the relationships between genes, tissues, organs, organisms, and external environments, and the perturbations that trigger genetic mutations and phenotypical responses, is so far beyond any kind of complex system ever modeled that only an interdisciplinary approach, leaning heavily on the computational skills of the information scientists, can hope to accomplish the task.

Titans in the computer field like Bill Gates and Wall Street insiders like Michael Milken poured funds into the new field of bioinformatics in hopes of advancing the collaborative partnership of the information and Life Sciences.

Computers are not only being used to decipher and store genetic information. They are also being used to create virtual biological environments from which to model complex biological organisms, networks, and ecosystems. The virtual environments help researchers create new hypotheses and scenarios that will later be used in the laboratory to test new agricultural and pharmaceutical products. Working in virtual laboratories, biologists can create synthetic molecules with a few keystrokes, bypassing the often laborious process—which can take years—of attempting to synthesize a real molecule on the lab bench. With 3D computer models, researchers can play with various combinations on the screen, connecting different molecules to see how they interact.

Scientists plan to create all sorts of new molecules in the future using the new Information Age computing technologies. Chemists are already talking about the potential for developing compounds that could reproduce themselves, conduct electricity, detect pollution, stop tumors, counter the effects of cocaine, and even block the progress of AIDS.

Gates is enthusiastic about the coming together of information technology and the Life sciences, saying that: “This is the information age,
and biological information is probably the most interesting information we are deciphering and trying to decide to change. It’s all a question of how, not if.”
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At present, computational technology is spreading to every other field, becoming the communication medium for organizing renewable energy, 3D printing, work, marketing, logistics, transport, health care, and online higher education. The new computing language for reorganizing society has brought together varied interests, including info-hackers, bio-hackers, 3D-hackers, and Cleanweb-hackers. The bond that unites all these groups is a deep commitment to a collaborative open-source economy and a Commons-governing model. While markets aren’t altogether dismissed, or governments left entirely out of the equation, the new movements share a passionate belief in the superiority of peer-to-peer Commons management as the best governing model to ensure that the benefits of a near zero marginal cost society are realized rather than stymied.

Chapter Eleven

The Collaboratists Prepare for Battle

T
he new commoners make up far more than a political movement. They represent a deep social transformation whose impacts are likely to be as significant and long lasting as those that catapulted society from a theological to an ideological worldview at the onset of the capitalist era.

The struggle between prosumer collaboratists and investor capitalists, while still nascent, is shaping up to be the critical economic battle of the first half of the twenty-first century. Recall that in part I we examined how the shift to the communication/energy matrix of the First Industrial Revolution was accompanied by the severing of workers from their own tools and shareholder investors from the management of the companies they owned. Today, the new Third Industrial Revolution communication/energy matrix is enabling consumers to become their own producers. The new prosumers, in turn, are increasingly collaborating and sharing goods and services in globally distributed networked Commons at near zero marginal costs, disrupting the workings of capitalist markets. The unfolding economic clash between the collaboratists and capitalists is a manifestation of a cultural conflict that will likely redefine the nature of the human journey in the years ahead. If there is an underlying theme to the emerging cultural narrative, it is the “democratization of everything.”

The Free Culture Movement, the Environmental Movement, and the movement to reclaim the public Commons are the coproducers, if you will, of this unfolding cultural drama. Each brings its own distinct set of metaphors to the script. And at the same time, they are increasingly borrowing each other’s metaphors, strategies, and policy initiatives, bringing them ever closer into a single frame.

If there was a trigger point for the Free Culture Movement, a moment in time that galvanized the hopes and imaginations of hackers, it was
probably when one of their own turned on them, exposing the rank commercial side of the computing and software revolution. In 1976, an angry young Bill Gates denounced his fellow hackers, unleashing a nasty diatribe along with a veiled warning:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? . . . Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? . . . The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software . . . but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
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Gates’s venting didn’t just come out of the blue. The computing and software industry was maturing. The hobby-hacker cultures at university tech hubs like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford, which had enjoyed a collegial and collaborative sharing of computing and software in a more relaxed, playful, and creative academic milieu, were faced with new actors in their midst, who were determined to take this new communications revolution into the marketplace. Gates was the first to draw the line in the sand. Another young hacker, Richard M. Stallman, who worked at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, took the challenge and crossed the line.

Rallying around Free Software

Stallman argued that software code was quickly becoming the language of communication between people, and between people and things, and that it was immoral and unethical to enclose and privatize the new communications media, allowing a few corporate players to determine the conditions of access while imposing rent. Stallman proclaimed that all software should be free, by which he meant as in “free speech, not free beer.” Stallman and Gates couldn’t be further apart in their positions—Gates viewed free software as theft and Stallman saw it as free speech.

Determined to create the technological means of keeping software distributed, collaborative, and free, Stallman assembled a consortium of the best software programmers around. They erected an operating system called GNU made up of free software that could be accessed, used, and modified by anyone. Stallman and others then founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 and established the four freedoms that underlay the organization’s credo:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. . . . The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your
neighbor. [And] the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.
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Stallman put flesh on his manifesto by creating a free software licensing scheme that he called a GNU General Public License (GPL) that would ensure the four freedoms stated above. These licenses, which Stallman dubbed “copyleft,” were conceived as an alternative way to use copyright law.
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Unlike conventional copyrights that give the holder the right to prohibit others from reproducing, adopting, or distributing copies of an author’s work, copyleft licenses allow an author to “give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it and require that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement.”
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The GPL became the vehicle for the establishment of a Commons for the free sharing of software. The license incorporated many of the paramount features Elinor Ostrom proposed for effective management of any Commons, most importantly the conditions of inclusion and the restrictions for exclusion; the rights governing access and withdrawal; monitoring sanctions and protocols for self-management; enhancement and stewardship of the resources, which, in this instance, is the code itself. The GPL and other free software licenses that followed gave millions of people in a software Commons the legal means to collaborate freely, with a formally agreed-upon set of operating principles. The GPL also laid the foundation for what would later metamorphose into the Free Culture Movement. Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard University who came to personify the Free Culture Movement, coined the apt phrase “Code is Law.”
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Just six years after Stallman went public with his GNU operating system and the GPL, a young college student at the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds, designed a free software kernel for a Unix-like operating system for personal computers (PCs) that was compatible with Stallman’s GNU project and distributed it under the Free Software Foundation’s GPL. The Linux kernel made it possible for thousands of prosumers around the world to collaborate via the Internet on improving free software code.
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Today, GNU/Linux is used in more than 90 percent of the fastest 500 supercomputers, as well as by Fortune 500 companies, and even runs on embedded systems like tablet computers and mobile phones.
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Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, wrote in 1999 of the seminal importance of the Linux achievement:

Because Torvalds chose to release the Linux kernel under the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License . . . the hundreds and eventually thousands of programmers around the world who chose to contribute their effort towards the further development of the kernel could be sure that their effort would result in permanently free software that no one
could turn into a proprietary product. Everyone knew that everyone else would be able to test, improve, and redistribute the improvements.
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GNU/Linux demonstrated something else of even greater significance—that free-software collaboration in a global Commons could best proprietary software development in the capitalist marketplace. Moglen continued:

The development of the Linux kernel proved that the Internet made it possible to aggregate collections of programmers far larger than any commercial manufacturer could afford, joined almost non-hierarchically in a development project ultimately involving more than one million lines of computer code—a scale of collaboration among geographically dispersed unpaid volunteers previously unimaginable in human history.
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The Free Software Movement was not without critics even inside the IT community. In 1998, some of the principal players in the movement split off to create what they called the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The founders, Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens, warned that the philosophical baggage that came with free software was frightening away commercial interests. They were particularly concerned that free software might become linked to the idea of zero cost. Zero cost, in the minds of private firms, conjured up the notion of zero margins, the elimination of profit, and free goods—too big a philosophical leap, they reasoned, for the business community to make.
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Their alternative was open-source software. The difference between free and open-source software is more perception than substance. Both rely on substantially the same types of licensing agreements. Raymond and Perens, however, were anxious to draw in the business community and believed that it would be easier to convince them of the merits of open-source code as a practical business proposition if the licensing was not attached to a philosophy that regarded the holding of proprietary information as immoral and unethical.
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Both Stallman and Raymond acknowledged that there was little difference in practice between free and open-source software. Stallman, however, believed that the shift in terminology weakened the concept, undermined the movement, and opened the door for the business community to whittle away at the gains of the Free Software Movement over the long run by encouraging subtle changes in the licensing agreements. Stallman summed up the differences in approach by asserting that “open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.”
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Stallman granted that open source would bring many more businesses to use free software, not because they agreed with its premises but only because they could fundamentally benefit from its deployment by bringing in more users. “Sooner or later,” he warned, “these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage.”
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Nonetheless, open-source software has been a runaway success and has drawn in large segments of the business community while continuing to pick up support in academic circles and civil society.

Still, the free and open-source software initiatives focused more on ensuring universal access to code—the language of the new media. What started as a geek exercise transformed into a social movement with the maturing of the Internet. Overnight, millions of people were connecting and creating new virtual salons for socializing. The emergence of social media shifted the discussion from code to conversation. The Internet became the global virtual public square, the meeting place to share music files, videos, photographs, news, and gossip. Suddenly, the Free Software Movement became part of a much larger Free Culture Movement. Eric Raymond used the metaphor of “the bazaar” to capture the buzzing virtual space where ideas, aspirations, and dreams melded with the myriad forms and expressions human beings employ to engage one another in deep play.
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There was a growing awareness of the Internet as a place where human beings create social capital rather than market capital. Every young person in the world wanted to get in on the act, creating videos and photos for each other to look at, sharing music tips, blogging ideas and observations, and contributing academic snippets on Wikipedia, with the hope that their input might be of value to other users.

This metamorphosis of human sociability is taking us beyond blood ties, religious affiliations, and national identities to global consciousness. This is a cultural phenomenon on an unprecedented scale, and is being led by 2.7 billion amateurs. The global democratization of culture is made possible by an Internet communication medium whose operating logic is distributed, collaborative, and laterally scaled. That operating logic favors an open Commons form of democratic self-management.

Lawrence Lessig was one of the first to see the deep social significance of a medium that was democratizing culture. The very word
culture
, at least in the past century, was segmented into high and low, with the implicit understanding that the former creates social capital of lasting value while the latter is relegated to cheap entertainment for the masses.

The Internet has tipped the cultural scales. The amateurs—2 billion strong—now find themselves on top, redirecting the social narrative from the professional elites to the masses. But the democratization of culture is not assured. Lessig and others warn of backlash as commercial and professional interests band together to tighten protection of intellectual property and close off the unique collaborative potential of the Internet as a forum for peer-to-peer creativity.

The Medium Is the Domain

Whether culture is created by elites or masses depends largely on the nature of the medium. The coal-powered steam printing revolution, and its
offshoots of books and periodicals, and later, the electricity revolution, and its progeny of film, radio, and television, favored copyright protection. The centralized nature of the media and the boundaried contours of the contributions “individualized” cultural content.
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Print introduced the idea of individual authorship. While individual authors existed previously—such as Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas—they were rare. In script culture, manuscripts were often written by hundreds of anonymous scribes over long periods of time. A scribe might slightly change the meaning of a small portion of the text by amplifying a sentence or two—hardly qualifying as a significant authorial contribution. Scribes saw their role as copiers. Even the few writers whose names are associated with an entire work did not so much think of themselves as creators of their own thoughts. Rather, they felt that ideas came from without in the form of a vision or inspiration—that they were struck by an idea. The very notion that an idea might come solely from within, as a unique creative insight, would have seemed strange, if not completely incomprehensible.