• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 855 0

and disseminating it, as their old mission statements once asked them to do. Grammar schools have learned that they can sell exclusive rights to soft drink vendors intent on creating brand loyalty in the very young. Public radio and television are now cluttered with advertising. Even commercial television has become more so: in the United States, the networks once limited their ads to nine minutes an hour; they gave that up in the last decade and ads now run eighteen minutes in prime time.

Natural abundance has been similarly commercialized, everywhere subject to the grid of artificial scarcity. Ancient aquifers, by rights belonging to all who live above them, are now pumped and packaged. Drinking water, once an essence of life, has become a resource to be sold in brand-differentiated packaging. Broadcast spectrum, one of nature’s richest gifts, has been parceled out to industry and then sold back to the public.

Our cultural abundance suffers the same fate. The ever-expanding reach of copyright has removed more and more art and ideas from the public domain. The Walt Disney Company happily built its film empire out of folk culture (Snow White, Pinocchio) but any folk who try to build on Disney can expect a cease and desist order in the next mail. Patents are now used to create property rights in things once thought inalienable—facts of nature, seed lines, human genes, medicines long known to indigenous cultures. A company that makes jam recently got itself a patent on the crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

This period of market triumphalism has, in sum, seen a successful move to commercialize a long list of things once thought to have no price, and to enclose common holdings, both natural and cultural, that we used to assume no one was allowed to take private. All of which seems quite grim, but only, I think, if we forget that history brought these changes and that history continues to unfold. As I said before, gift-institutions supporting the noncommercial portion of our lives will change as the times change. None of us wants to return to the days when a great scientist had to hope the king might make him Master of the Mint, nor—if we care for the arts and sciences as ends in themselves—should we pine for the days of patronage as propaganda. If we want our institutions to have the longevity they deserve, then the commercial side of our culture needs to be met with an indigenous counterforce, not a foreign one.

To close this excursion into matters topical and practical, then, let me point to a necessarily limited sample of places where the commercial and the noncommercial are found in better balance. A good number may be seen on the Internet, itself a post-Soviet surprise of history if there ever was one. Numerous projects on the Web have the structures and fertility of gift communities. There are many examples, from the free software movement to the donated labor supporting political blogs to the “NASA Clickworkers,” a set of over eighty-five thousand anonymous, untrained volunteers who helped classify all the craters on maps of Mars.

Or take the Public Library of Science. This Web-based publishing venture has protocols reminiscent of the scientific community as described in chapter 5. There I write that papers published in scientific journals are called “contributions” for good reason; “They are in fact, gifts,” as one theorist says, gifts to a community whose currency is the merit that a scientist acquires when her ideas are accepted and passed along.

This gift ethic never extended, however, to the actual printing and distribution of scientific journals. On the contrary, the cost of subscribing to these journals has been a growing problem for many libraries (the price of publications in science rose by about 260 percent during the 1990s). A one-year subscription to The American Journal of Human Geneticsnow costs over $1,000 and a good science library needs scores of such subscriptions. At current rates, poorly endowed colleges and, more importantly, the poorer nations, literally cannot afford to enter the