Free and worthless

It's time to rethink internet culture, says Jason Walsh

After mass protests across Europe, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) has joined recent US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect IP Act (Pipa) on the scrapheap of history.

On the one hand it's a pretty clear victory for people power. Protestors across Europe took to the streets with a clear agenda and politicians saw this and started to roll back.

On the other hand, it really is about time we got to grips with the internet culture we are creating.

Sopa and Pipa were not good laws and deserved to be junked. Acta now appears to be headed in the same direction. While the negotiation process was far from public and therefore deeply problematic, most of the accusations flung by anti-Acta activists simply weren't true. Acta did not give customs the right to seize people's iPods, nor did it include a "three strikes" rule for illegal downloading. Either way, though, it is time to rethink online culture's free-for-all.

No reasonable person wants to deny creators a living. Sadly plenty of unreasonable people do, as a quick dive into comment threads on tech websites like Slashdot will indicate.

As everyone knows, the internet was an academic creation and it has inculcated a culture of sharing knowledge and information. This is fine as far as it goes, but not all information is flat. The reductionism involved in depicting music, film or even journalism as simple information is a breathtaking act of intellectual acrobatics that sees things as existing pre-formed, just waiting to be plucked and consumed.

In reality much of it is a product of labour — and not just the "creative" labour that we all pay lip service to, but a lot of people doing an awful lot of unglamorous work, too.

A university scholar is free to share his or her ideas because they are salaried professionals who derive an income from institutions that are funded by state aid, massive donations and tuition fees. The rest of us? We need to be directly paid for our work. But the argument isn't just about creators' rights.

The tech industry has successfully portrayed that battle as one between "Big Content" and the little guy in the form of the consumer. Unfortunately this is a rather partial picture that ignores the work of not only the auteur genius (a fairly dubious idea in the first place) but also the veritable armies of people who work to get the culture we consume past the idea stage into actual existence.

The decoupling of information — seen as little more than disembodied, free-floating assertions — from work has its roots in the left's post-modern theories that gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s and the business class's simultaneous abandonment of risky and costly industrial production for rent seeking schemes that provided massive returns on investment at the cost of increased instability. When these ideas met widespread internet access it was perhaps inevitable that people would suddenly demand access to all non-material goods for free, but to reduce every product of intellectual or artistic labour to mere symbols is to deny reality.

Theories that promised liberation from hierarchy are now being used to enforce an even more rigid hierarchy, but one that is being created in the name of democracy and participation centred on continous and endless communication between peers. The problem is, the content of our communication is invariably small and individual, or else the result of other people's hard work. We are all free to trade in symbols, but symbols make for a fairly poor replacement for fully realised culture and ideas. We will all be poorer if we strip the value from culture.