Freedom and Sharing in the Global Network Society: Digital Resources and Artificial Scarcity

Abstract

The Promise and the ProblemsThe profusion of digital technology contains a mixed, if not contradictory, set of practices that both support and undermine the development of democratic and sustainable societies.The tension is felt in the affluent North, but even more acutely in the developing countries.If we were to adopt French philosopher Etienne Balibar's notion of égaliberté -the unconditional demand for equality as inseparable from freedom that transcends any positive order -in the context of digital technology, we could claim that due to its nature digital information does have tremendous revolutionary potential.Anything that can be presented as digital code, as a series of ones and zeros, can be copied with very little cost and no loss to the original.Thus, from the technological point of view, after the infrastructure is in place digital information is not a scarce resource.Correspondingly, on the level of social organisation the digital world is seen as a torch-bearer of new forms of organisation that have radical political implications.Volunteer hacker organisations and the organisation of various civil society activities through the Internet have been seen, on the one hand, as providing new blood for the Habermasian ideal of democratic communication and, on the other, as completely new forms of civic self-organisation and self-management (for hacker communities and theories of hacker communities, see Castells, 1996; DiBona et al, 1999;Himanen, 2000).For instance, while looking for examples of the new multitudes that they advocate as the basic self-organising models of future politics, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (2004, pp.301ff.)turn to free and open source communities and related activities.When the self-organisational nature of hacker communities is combined with the observation that digital code by its technical nature is not a scarce resource but can readily be copied and distributed with close to zero costs, we get a 'cybercommunist' utopia, where volunteer organisations are able to manage themselves in a post-scarcity economy (see, for instance, the discussions in Žižek 2001, 2004).This is where the notion of égaliberté meets the political economy of digital resources: digital information as a raw material, tool and product could be abundant, providing for a digital community of 'share-andshare-alike'.The motivation for the conference 'Policy Options and Models for Bridging Digital Divides: freedom, sharing and sustainability in the global network society' [1] held at the University of Tampere in March 2005, was to create a forum for analyses and concrete ideas of digital equality, as well as more utopian views of its possibilities.The papers assembled here reflect both the empirical and theoretical work presented at the conference.They are arranged in three sections: case studies, theoretical background and models for policy.To frame the issue as a whole let us introduce the issue of digital equality by sketching the broader égalibertarian background that forms the context of the contributions.

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