The Separation of (Economic) Power: A Cultural Environmental Perspective of Social Production and the Networked Public Sphere

This article applies the second enclosure movement critique to Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), It employs the emergent discourse of cultural environmentalism so as to diagnose and resolve IPR issues evident within the information environment. Cultural environmentalism borrows analytical frameworks from environmentalism, such as those relating to the commons, public choice theory, welfare economics, and ecology. The article provides a brief overview of the second enclosure movement critique and cultural environmentalism. It adopts the analytical framework of the commons. Specifically, it is the commons-related tragedies such as the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of the anticommons, and the tragedy of (ignoring) the information semicommons, that provide insight into critical efficiency concerns that lie dormant within the information environment. Ultimately, the article argued that there are certain conditions and situations where social production may trump other modes of production within the information processing and allocation efficiency realms. Drawing upon Benkler’s hardware-code-content paradigm, it was seen that it is the code layer of a given technology that provides the greatest social production opportunities. The realization of these opportunities will depend, at least to some extent, on the cyclical timing of critical hardware infrastructure within a given industry. The fundamental thesis of this paper was that where relevant infrastructure is readily accessible; where the factors of production include undeveloped ideas and unarticulated know-how; and where the allocation of human creativity and/or intellectual input are relied upon as the impetus of innovation, social production may be the most efficient mode of production when contrasted with alternate modes of production such as state-, firm-, or market-based production. An important corollary of this article that is implicit within the paper is that social production provides opportunity to diversify the modes of production available within future technological production processes and, in so doing, affords the possibility of harnessing the critical liberal function of separating (economic) power.