Redbaiting in the 21st century

[ritaxis]

Okay, so here's the Bill Gates thing. I probably hardly need to put the links in, because it's all over the place by now. But I will, because I'm a good girl.

The interviewer said:
Q: "In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

Bill Gates said:
A: "No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future."

(From this article , by way of Boing Boing.

Now, there's a lot of outrage because Bill Gates is calling names in an obvious ploy to marginalize, to get his position on intellectual property rights perceived as mainstream, normal, conservative, when it's actually a bizarre, rapacious, radical change. I'm properly outraged too.

Go to the Boing Boing link and follow the links within the article to find the artistic response . . . and go here to see some of the responses to the response. Patrick thinks that this is mere epâter le bourgeois and will harm us in the eyes of the people. I don't. I think it's a reflection of the real argument -- which is something I just thought of, not my original contribution to the conversation. My original contribution to the conversation was that I think that boisterous, defiant, and colorfully ironic responses are healthy and get to people better than careful, circumscribed, moderate expression. That I think we lose when we worry about offending people, and we win when we don't. Which is not, really, to be advocating an entirely offensive line of conversation and action. What I really want to see is tagteaming, but I want a part of that tag team to be way way over on the left, pulling the struggle over into the place where it can really breathe, move, and grow. Is that a hopelesly mixed metaphor? I'll fix it later.

But. Since I thought about it more I'm realized that Bill Gates is right in a way he can't imagine. The battle right now is capitalism vs. something. And the something looks like communism to Bill Gates because it is the opposite to capitalism -- but it's something new, awaiting a new generation of theorists to describe it. It has a lot in common with communism, at least to these old commie eyes: but it's not your grandad's social democracy, it's something, as I said, new. But not unprecedented. There's something happening, and it's happening on a lot of fronts at once. Not just GPL (this stuff).

The big demonstrations against the global manipulations of the World Bank and the IMF were neither sentimental nor feckless. They were the real manifestation of a real. worldwide, historical movement, and they were effective. Since Seattle, there have been no new globalization agreements.

I can't go on. It's time to go.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Told ya.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. ANd I bet you've been thinking it for a while, just as I have. But every so often something happens to tweak my understanding of it a little further.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I coined the phrase "information socialism" something like 25 years ago, because it seemed clear that information networks could transform social relations. I then found that I would have had to write a book to be able to discuss the idea with anyone! Everyone misunderstood it--the kneejerk reactions from the right didn't surprise me, but I found there was also no way to discuss it with anyone from the left, who were either convinced that socialism had to be about labor in industrial environments or in repastoralizing the world. Even the 60s new left philosophical sort of people who looked like they would grab the idea & run with it were busy in philsophical cloud-cuckoo land. And they were all very upset by the idea--social transformation is scary, even to me, and people hold tightly to their beliefs.

So there it sat and finally, it seems, the world is beginning to catch up. Weird.