by Andrew Piper
It was this sharedness, when coupled with the opposing trend toward the rising proprietization of code, that led to Unix’s demise as an industry standard. The more it was shared, the more it bifurcated into different versions, versions that eventually came to compete with one another. The original became Unix System V owned by AT&T. Berkeley Unix became BSD, Free BSD, 386BSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as well as the basis of Sun Microsystems’s Solaris. Andrew Tanenbaum created Minix, which then turned into Linux, one of the great stories of open-source computing. Sharing was not just a force of commonality. It was a powerful tool for generating a landscape of prodigious versional diversity.
[FIGURE 5.4] A chart of the history of Unix versions, adapted from Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 61.
The history of computing, like the history of books, is related at a deep level to a culture of sharing. Unix was no different. From the rise of the free software movement to its rival idea of open-source software, from the rise of time-sharing operating systems to information networks, from the Whole Earth Catalogue to new-wave theories of the coming Singularity, computer programming has been suffused with ideals of sharing and sharedness from its inception, in both theory and practice.20 When we lament the oversharing of social media today we do well to remember these communal roots of digital culture. But we would do just as well to remember the particular story of Unix, the law of forking that stands behind it.
Sharing is now a default setting on almost all digital reading interfaces. The question is no longer if you would like to share what you are reading but how. As the sociologist Antoine Hennion has argued, such networks of amateur interest—or “taste” from Hennion’s French perspective—facilitate greater self-reflection on the part of readers. Like the amateur wine drinker who looks up from his glass to explain his thoughts rather than just consume the wine, when we choose to share our reading with someone else we are engaging in a moment of self-reflection, a “perplexed state,” in Hennion’s words. But we are also testing our relationship to ideas against those around us. “Taste,” writes Hennion, “lived by each but fashioned by all, is a history of oneself permanently remade together with others.”21
We not only share as readers, but we are also increasingly encouraged to do so as writers. “Collaboration” is the new watchword of the day. From Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth-century homage to individualism On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), we have moved to online tools like Brain Candy, where readers are reconceived as “content producers in their own right” who participate in the “co-creation of value.” Teen writing sites, cellphone novels, and now the holy grail of publishing, the app, are all forums where readers’ comments can be incorporated into this latest version of serialized writing. Long live the Victorian novel.
These tools, and many more like them, are manifestations of Henry Jenkins’s notion of participatory culture, where fans coproduce the world of content that belongs to an artistic work. For Jenkins such practices are part and parcel of the realization of a new collective intelligence: “None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.”22 Where we used to think in binary terms of production and consumption or reading and writing, theorists today speak of things like “produsage” (production through use) and “wreading” (where every time you read a digital text you generate, or write, a unique version of it).23 Wikipedia is the god of this new order of neologisms.
And right on cue we find a host of new “anti-social manifestoes” and appeals for more rugged individualism.24 We continue to worry about oversharing. But in many ways, this just takes us back to the origins of writing, which was thought to be a gift of the gods. Whether it belonged to the muse, a holy spirit, or the vox populi, our reading material has most often been imagined to belong to something greater than ourselves. “Knowledge is a gift of God, therefore it cannot be sold,” went a common medieval saying.25 As a variety of critics have pointed out, there are profound ethical implications of thinking about reading in this way. You don’t have to believe in Raymond Kurzweil’s notion of “The Singularity”—the moment when humans will transcend their biological foundations and exist as one networked consciousness online—to feel the pronounced sense of how we are being woven together today through our digital reading.26 The question remains whether such collective work could ever produce something more creative than a committee report or an encyclopedia. The Runes of Gallidon—Brain Candy’s first collaborative work—is no Aeneid.
Such collective fantasies have a long and venerable past, by no means alien to the world of books and print. The editors of the early nineteenth-century periodical the Athenaeum similarly dreamed of “the combination of individual thought into one mighty mass of intellect, that vast embodied essence of society called Public Opinion.”27 The newspaper was to be the medium of the universal mind.
The recurrence of such fantasies would be all well and good if it were not for two troubling facts. The first is what we might call the problem of the “nondisplay view,” the use of data by corporations or governments that is not tied to the immediate presentation of that data. When distributors of electronic books store your reading data or annotations on their servers; when search engines store your page views; when social networking sites store everything you write, you are by default sharing your reading, whether you want to or not. It may not be “public” (i.e., on display), but it is being read. In this scenario you’re not an amateur or connoisseur, one who loves or knows, but a test subject, someone who is constantly being measured. The fantasy of the circle of readers—whether it was in the woods, the coffeehouse, or the living room—was the way it put you outside of some other circle. It was fashioned as a means of escape (from life, work, the public sphere, or an evil aunt). Sharing and privacy may be rhetorically opposed today, but they are historically linked. The return of the “pirate bay” is one example of a digital space where readers are still attempting to share privately with one another or control when they share.
The second problem takes the rather inelegant form of “the license.” If there is a Singularity out there, it is copyright law. Not only are ever more facets of intellectual life thought to be copyrightable—up to and including life itself—but the restrictions surrounding what others can do with such material are becoming increasingly extensive. When early modern printers received a royal license (a privilège in French), it restricted other people’s right to print books. But it said nothing about what readers could do. In the new licensing culture, it is readers who are now granted a license, because everyone is potentially a printer. We no longer buy books, we borrow them. The dream of the universal library has turned into the library as the universal way of accessing books—with mandatory fees. We don’t purchase, we agree to terms of use (all the time). This is incidentally how children interact with objects, always conditionally. We are either absolute borrowers or absolute owners. We have lost mechanisms through which we hand something over to another, through which readers make something their own.
In 2001, a group of intellectual property experts and computer scientists founded the Creative Commons. It is to the culture industry what the Free Software Foundation is to computing. It creates, distributes, and supports licenses that are more nuanced than the “all rights reserved” logic of copyright. With a Creative Commons license you can allow people to download and share your material for free or even rework it for their own commercial gain. The movement’s goal is to restore a certain reasonableness to digital practices of sharing, to reclaim habits and practices that were once “common” but that have increasingly become criminalized under the new licensing regime. The larger aim is the creation of a legal “space” that is immune to the reach of copyright, a domain where we can borrow, remix, and share ideas with minimal limitations.
As James Boyle, one of the group’s founders, has argued, Creative Commons is modeled on the environmental mo
vement of the 1960s.28 Like the “environment,” there is an abstraction out there called the public domain (now the intellectual commons) that is diminishing and that our laws are encouraging us to diminish. By giving this space a name and publicizing the irrationality of our incursions, the hope is to motivate us to change our ways. Or rather, for some of us to change our ways so that others do not have to. The beauty of the environmental movement was that, like the environment, it required a total effort. Everyone was affected—consumers and producers alike had to make sacrifices to restore elementary things like water, air, and the earth back to health. The problem with the Creative Commons is that it makes no claims on how consumers (formerly readers) think about the practices of sharing it intends to protect.
For some, the combination of technological change and new political infrastructures like Creative Commons or the Free Software Foundation could begin to significantly alter our relationship to intellectual property for the first time since its institutionalization in the eighteenth century.29 In this view, the last two hundred years might one day be seen as a brief, and aberrant, period, like when we believed in ghosts (i.e., intellectual property). For others, we are witnessing nothing more than a new gilded age of the proprietization of thought for the few at the expense of the many.30
What both positions overlook is the way sharing and owning have historically been related to one another. Sharing and owning are not the agons we typically make them out to be, but two aspects within a larger spectrum of how we relate to ideas. All systems of intellectual property, even the most collective, have had some form of personal ownership, of how we internalize the ideas of a community and make them our own, just as all forms of commercial property exist alongside robust economies of sharing. The periodic rise of invocations of “friendship” surrounding reading, whether in the form of Renaissance humanism or American transcendentalism, Alba amicorum or Gift Books, are nothing more than the cyclical correctives to the rising commercialization of reading during these same periods. Along with luminaries such as Erasmus or Emerson, numerous individuals were attempting to work out new ways and new technologies of holding reading in common, while also acknowledging the limits that such commonality posed.
We are at a similar moment today. At issue is not the owning or disowning of ideas, free culture versus commodity culture. Rather, at issue is their proper integration, how we can move from the one to the other. At issue is how we can share well. When we use terms like “Creative Commons,” “wiki,” or even “Brain Candy,” we are making assumptions about the inherent commonality of ideas—that they are “as common as air” in Judge Brandeis’s formulation in one of the foundational cases of intellectual property law, requiring no more work than breathing in to absorb them.
And yet there is nothing inherently common about the intellectual commons.31 The history of sharing books, as well as software, tells a different story. Remember Unix and the law of forking. “Free” is useless for figuring out a system of value, meaning, and commonality. It just creates the proliferation of multiple, usually incompatible, versions. This is the tragedy of the intellectual commons—not overuse, but what amounts to its opposite: overproliferation. Sharing, and sharing well, is what brings that proliferation into a meaningful order. Licensing culture is by itself not enough.
If we are going to do something transformative about the problem of intellectual property, we must attend more to the practices of sharing and not just the laws and the technologies that constrain it. In this, the history of books can once more be instructive. As we saw with Celan and Bachmann, real sharing takes time. There is an asynchrony to sharing that cannot be speeded up. Wiki, the Hawaiian word for “fast,” belies the time it takes to have ideas in common. We need to design more for time in our so-called social media.
But we also need to design more for scarcity. Copying is not the same as sharing. Having a file in common that we can both access at the same time overlooks any sense of personal investment in the process, that which makes sharedness possible. In order to share something, I must also give something up. This is the lesson of childhood, Adam’s rib, and the history of book givers like Mauranus, Aldrovandi, and Shakespeare. To this end, we need—brace yourself for this—to embrace DRM. Instead of making it a crime to share, we should be making it easier to share when it is conditioned upon loss. Just as when I give a material object to someone, we should be able to transfer rights more easily from one person to another. Only then will the two of us feel what it means to impart and part with something as the beginning of our mutual understanding.
Making digital objects more unique, and thus less copyable, also means making them easier to interact with, to do more things to and with them. The problem with DRM is not that it tries to make digital objects more like print objects. The problem is that in doing so it loses many of the personalizing features that belonged to books. Marginalia, dedications, rebinding, putting things into books—these were all ways that one could make a copy unique and thus more meaningful when one gave it away. As the Victorian essayist Leigh Hunt remarked, “One precious name, or little inscription at the beginning of the volume . . . is worth all the binding in St. James’s.”32 We need a more layered notion of DRM, one that can guarantee the uniqueness of an object as well as our ability to interact with it. Only in this way can we make it our own and thus give something of ourselves away when we share it.
If genuine sharing involves a certain element of sacrifice, of giving something up, it also entails an acknowledgment of limits. Not everything can be shared. This is the lesson of the fable of St. Martin who cut his coat in half to give to a beggar. If we shared everything, we would have nothing left to share. Oversharing only exists as a problem if we spend too little time cultivating something our own. What I do not share or cannot share is truly who I am. More time thinking about and designing for our unshareables, all those aspects of our mental and emotional lives that are inalienable, will serve as an important antidote to the perceived oversharing of social media today. As the contemporary artist Aram Bartholl has shown, it means imagining more of what he calls “dead drops,” spaces where information does not go anywhere, in this case memory sticks imbedded in the walls of cities throughout the world (fig. 5.5). Bartholl’s work is a moving digital version of the ancient practice of whispering secrets into the hollows of trees.
[FIGURE 5.5] Aram Bartholl, Dead Drops (2010). Courtesy of the artist.
Finally, genuine sharing is about taking care of something not your own once it has been given to you. Being shared with comes with an obligation. Unlike a gift, you are more of a custodian than an owner of a shared object. In creative terms, it would be the difference between the novels of someone like the German émigré writer W. G. Sebald, who meticulously records the stories of Jewish emigrants and their memories after the war using a complicated web of indirect discourse, and the many digital forms of the “remix” or “mash-up” today. In Sebald, someone else’s story becomes interwoven into his own, but it still remains partially intact, never entirely his. Mashing, as the name viscerally tells us, lacks this sense of care or responsibility for something or someone else. It eschews commonality in the name of the commons.
I realize that criticizing remix culture and embracing DRM puts me on the wrong side of history (how old is this guy anyway?). But despite the grand claims of “everything is social” today, there is remarkably little mutuality online. On the one hand, the history of books tells us this is as it should be—having ideas in common is extremely difficult. But the history of books also gives us a glimpse into a variety of practices that can help mitigate the shearing of reading, the way it divides us as much as it brings us together. Instead of more antisocial manifestoes or more paeans to free culture, we need greater attention to the contradictions inherent in what Emerson defined as true intellectual friendship: “We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.”33
. . .
At the opening of his evocat
ive essay on unpacking his library, Walter Benjamin suggested that one of the best ways to build a library of one’s own is through inheritance.34 I often think about this when I look at my own library. Modest as it is (I am no book collector), will my children want all of these books when I am dead? What if they don’t read German, or if they find that there are too few in French, or if they just don’t want books anymore? Will my library be referred to, as was the case in one probate inventory from the seventeenth century, as “his books and other trash”?35
Whether personal or institutional, a library is a space of sharing. Books share space with other books, accruing value through their proximity. The “stack” or “pile” is one of the most fundamental ways that books have meaning for us. But in placing books on a shelf, owners are also sharing books with others. Look, says a bookshelf, here is a collection of my ideas.
A hard drive, on the other hand, is a curious kind of library. Instead of books, it is full of files, which are not stacked, but imbedded within one another. The hard drive is more like a law office. Depending on whom those files “belong” to, they can or cannot be shared with others. But unlike books on the bookshelf, files on hard drives cannot be visually shared with those around us (or even with ourselves—files nested within each other do not allow for an easy visual sense of the whole). Hard drives do not perform in quite the same way as shelves.