screw the spotted owl

Amateurs are more sincere than professionals. Rehad Desai, co-director of the film You Chuse: the future is free, reminded viewers at this month's Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, that a sex worker might deliver a technically good performance, but she will probably leave you less than satisfied. Why? Insincerity. Amateur sex - the kind that happens in the bedrooms of committed couples - might be less slick, but is likely to be more satisfying because of a greater emotional investment.

What has sex to do with the Spotted Owl? I'm coming to that, in a roundabout way.

You Chuse, which presents the case for the open source movement and restoration of the creative commons, makes the intriguing point that as intellectual property dominates more and more of modern life as a financially tradable commodity, there is less space for things to develop for reasons other than financial reward. The film suggests that science and most human endeavours advance by building on what went before. If "what went before" is copyrighted and unavailable for others to use, then advancement only takes place in the R&D departments of corporations, and is driven by financial returns alone. Individuals with little or no capital have no opportunity to contribute.

This applies as much to culture as to science. If we can't build on what other people have developed in films, songs, plays and books, we become culturally impoverished. We can't rely on professionals - those who own the IP - to make sure that culture develops in healthy directions. (Have you ever asked yourself what exactly we would be losing if the Hollywood movie industry collapsed?) Just as the Internet and other tools become more widespread, allowing individuals to make contributions to cultural development with no capital outlay, corporations start to clamp down even harder on people who try to use music or video clips in new ways.

I am not advocating illicit file sharing or creating illegal mashups for financial gain. What I am suggesting is that the legal paradigm for intellectual property might be a problem.

Even Bill Gates acknowledges that pirated software (transgressions of Microsoft's IP) can be used to his company's advantage. Ninety percent of PCs in China run Microsoft Windows, and most of those systems are illegal. But this "free" distribution of software has allowed Microsoft to establish a huge new market. If they had clamped down hard on piracy, China might now be running Linux instead of Windows. [I read this in the current issue of The Spectator or The Economist, but I can't find the online reference.]

Technology and culture are not entirely independent of each other. And the cultural problem we face is that it is commodified, constrained and crushed. Broken down to the lowest common denominator of the idiot tourist who wants to see virgin maidens dancing naked in Zululand.

I am nearly at the part about the Spotted Owl.

As the name of this blog suggests, carbon is an important touchstone of ecological well-being. Monitoring the circulation of carbon through human activities is a pretty good way to see how we might be changing the climate and polluting Gaia. But carbon isn't everything, I have to keep reminding myself.

The title of this post is not to suggest that endangered species might as well just drop off the face of the earth. Rather, it is a tongue-in-cheek reminder (borrowed from the cover of the current issue of Wired magazine) that humankind is facing an environmental challenge that calls for unfortunate compromises. Hard choices that will become even more difficult if we delay. The Wired editors feel that this means that "The war on greenhouse gases is too important to be left to the environmentalists." Which is to say, let's not get too precious about our pet causes. If we have to lose the fucking owl, well, that's unfortunate, but there are bigger things at stake.

I agree with the need to take the big picture seriously, but Wired seems to be leaning towards relying on the professionals to tell us what to do, and that's where it gets tricky. One can argue that, left to our own devices, we've fucked things up quite nicely. The market certainly has not kept the planet in pristine condition. So if climate scientists say things are looking grim, let's do something about it. The question is, "What?"

It seems to me that it's not going to be enough to hope that the professionals who design new technologies or plan our cities or operate public transport systems will be able to mitigate the multitude of environmental challenges we face, from species extinction to soil erosion, water pollution and health pandemics. This goes way beyond carbon.

This goes to open source culture.

The open source movement is about taking control of the tools we use to get the job done: crowd-sourcing to create change from the bottom up. It's not anarchy - there are controls in place - but it is intended to ensure that when we identify a need, we can change things to meet that need, without having to rely on Big Brother Bill.

That's how cultural evolution has always been, but the producers of You Chuse argue that healthy cultural development is being eroded. And if we are to address environmental challenges, we need to regain control so that cultural norms can evolve organically to meet the challenges.

To be sure, our individual choices can be improved by better access to appropriate technologies, and on a larger scale the planners need to do the Right Thing (whatever that may be). But I suspect that, given the right tools and information, and with awareness of the consequences of our choices, we will begin to change in the right direction.

Comments

[Duncan Drennan]

"That's how cultural evolution has always been, but the producers of You Chuse argue that healthy cultural development is being eroded."

I think you will be interested in this article, "The Gospel of Consumption". Look out for this quote,

"This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk."