Intellectual Property Law

Cathy Davidson is (as always) asking all the right questions

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-For-Everybody:

I keep thinking about what is missing in the DIY economy, who gets left out. Is it the same people who traditionally have labor that is considered worthless? DIY youth, social participation, and interactivity are all good, but what does it mean if that very thing ("affective labor," in Hardt and Negri's terms) is the hottest commodity of the information age? And I'm doing it, expressing myself and my creativity, but you are turning it to profit. Nicholas Carr calls this "sharecropping" and he has a point in his cynicism about Web 2.0. Do-It-Yourself can bleed too quickly into Do-It-For-Everybody, which can morph into Do-It-For-Them ("them" often, these days, being Google). ...

... My concern is the bi-directionality of that transformation. How do youth use mobile technologies to transform their relationships? But then how to do those creativing mobile technologies use youth activity for data mining and even market research (all those Google stats and social graphis) for the next generations of devices that they then cell to youth so they can transform their next set of relationships. There is some slippage between DIY and Do-It-For-Them. Them R Us? Not so sure. Often those who are not being paid for their labors in this economy are the artists, musicians, and writers who weren't really remunerated in the old economy either. Who is the "everybody" in Clay Shirky's (and I love the book, btw) "Here Comes Everybody"?

Well, that's pretty much what I hope to answer in my book, The Googlization of Everything.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on April 16, 2008 (boomark / email).