- Author: Antranig Basman
- Paper Link
Abstract
Increasingly, the rights and capabilities to own technological artefacts, where they exist at all, are reserved to corporations and not to citizens. There are historical, economic, metaphysical, ideological and cognitive reasons for this situation, in addition to purely technological factors, which we will trace by following the fate of various concrete examples, analysed into five categories of ownable elements. These categories are those of ownable function, ownable expression, ownable data, ownable installations and ownable economies. In this paper, we attempt to align these goals of ownability into a research and activism program by describing a set of revolutionary goals in each category, and tracing ways we could reach them.
Notes
- Digital serfdom
- Special rights for the few
- Special obligations for the many
- Partly comes from how we treat corporations as persons
- Cloud computing in particular makes ownership and software reuse difficult or impossible
QUOTE
In terms of aligning with a historical trajectory, we should note that even if we envision a socialistic far future, establishing the means for personal property and thus ending feudalism is a basic requirement to even operate capitalism. Marx did not even propose to operate communism without a basis for personal property
QUOTE
If you find a piece of software that does something of value to you, it should be possible to make it your own. This implies that you can keep using it as part of the collection of tools you carry with you, in familiar contexts, or experiment with using it in novel contexts.
QUOTE
the Open Authorial Principle: “Any expression by one author can have its effect replaced by an additional expression by a further author” (Basman et al., 2018).
QUOTE
a pre-industrial environment plagued by irregularities like screws that are not of a size to match screw threads, trains that cannot run on each other’s tracks, or electricity that may not travel between different wire networks (David and Bunn, 1988)