SIVACRACY.NET

This is a very irritating editorial with some extra-special stupid premises, including the assumption that those who value public access and open services in information infrastructure don't support vigorous private sector investment and employment, even when private enterprise obviously benefits from access to common knowledge bases as well.

I hate to sound like Michael Moore, but I've just come back from spending an inordinate amount of time in Canada, where they seem to have a more sensible attitude about public assets that is hardly anti-corporate.

Siva (and Liz, whose "very irritating" characterization I assume is aimed at me),

It is a strange thing to read an indignant reaction to something I wrote that appears, on a close reading, to reflect a broad agreement (me with you rather than you with me, if you prefer) rather than dissent. Of *course* it's complicated and of *course* private interests can be on the side of truth and justice; that's my point.

We have different sensibilities about rhetoric. IMO, the standard tropes -- whether they're used to attack Google (today) or Microsoft (today and yesterday) or Disney (for a long time) or IBM (back when it was always the bad guy), or to applaud writers or librarians or documentarians, or to attack or applaud remixers and creative and simply personal users -- tend to distance us from core principles, rather than reveal or appeal to them. I'd rather talk about the core principles themselves rather than hang on to the tropes. (Republican civic virtue is itself a sufficiently complicated concept.) I have friends who are documentarians and librarians and writers, all people of noble spirit and good will. I also have friends who work in senior positions for Google and Disney, and I believe them to be people of noble spirit and good will. And I've found that both groups of people are capable of reasoned discussion about core principles.

I have no idea what Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, or Blackwater are doing in this post.

Best,

Mike

My 1983 Public Finance text by David Hyman defines public goods as(I quote) "goods whose benefits are shared by large groups of consumers and... the most common means of making public goods available is through political interaction among persons who benefit from the good." Furthermore, to be a truly public good it has to be "nonrival" i.e. "a given quantity can be enjoyed by more than one without decreasing the amounts enjoyed by others. It also must be "nonexclsusive" meaning that "it is too costly to develop a means of excluding those who refuse to pay from enjoying the benefit of a given quantity of a public good"

Siva mentions police, fire fighters, and soldiers. Economically, they are classic examples of public goods; they are nonrival and nonexclusive.

The problem with copyrighted works, which were traditionally private goods, and the internet is that the internet has made them nonrival and nonexclusive. As a culture we sense this intuitively. Sensing this we, perhaps rightly, feel that instead of having these goods allocated by private economic actors, their allocation and availability should be determined "through political interaction among persons who benefit from the good."

I guess as someone who actually studies rhetoric at my day job, I'm always wary of those who dismiss opposing viewpoints as "just rhetoric," as you seem to do with your references to "the standard tropes." Maybe I've put the term "rhetoric" into the search engine of the White House website too many times and have seen the negative over-generalizations of our President on the subject, but some of us still think -- as the Greeks did -- that rhetoric is a valuable subject, which is critical for public communication and good citizenship, and that there can be "good rhetoric" as well as badly done attempts to persuade and mark occasions. Speaking of this particular pet peeve, I couldn't help but notice that you use the term "rhetoric" in conjunction with descriptors like "overheated" and "overdone" in your original post, and it is something that people should resist "internalizing." Next time, please remember that the word has positive as well as negative connotations and that you only create more obstacles for the tens of thousands of people who teach writing in this country by perpetuating the view that communication is more "honest" without any consideration for the intended audience or the common conventions that they may expect you to use.

I'm puzzled, puzzled by the idea that I dismissed opposing viewpoints (I didn't), puzzled by the notion that I dismissed anything on the basis of their being "just rhetoric" (didn't, again), puzzled by the inference that I think the rhetoric is an unimportant subject either intellectually or politically (there's no evidence of that), and really puzzled by the proposition that I don't care about audiences and conventions (that's just made up).

Please remember that lawyers, too, study language and are fully aware of its benefits as well as its drawbacks. I stand by the basic proposition that I offered in my original post, which was and is: In the access to information and knowledge debate, lines have been drawn based on tropes that need not be but have often gotten overheated and overused, and that seem to me to interfere with -- rather than advance -- real understanding.