Digitizing the Mind: Why Information won’t be Owned

Is capitalism obsolete in the Information Age?

In an interview with the website New Economic Thinking, mathematician Eric Weinstein suspects that capitalism may be coming to an end, not because of any ideological rivalry but because of the impact of recent technologies.

Capitalism, democracy, and liberalism ushered in what we call modernity, as the stagnant world run by feudalism was turned upside down by the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, by the Great Famine, the Black Death, the Papal Schism, and by the European exploration of North America. Eventually, liberalism would triumph over fascism and communism.

But now, despite the lack of any rigorous conception of a viable alternative economic system, private ownership of the means of production and the pursuit of profit seem poised to become obsolete, thanks to accidental developments in information technologies.

In particular, asks Weinstein, what happens if “by turning physical objects made of atoms into small files made of bits, we push private goods into being public goods, because after all, a small file is inexhaustible and non-excludable, which is the very definition of a very pernicious kind of market failure?” (See the 15:15 mark in the video interview.)

The Freedom of Information

What he’s suggesting, I think, is reminiscent of the libertarian’s slogan that information wants to be free. Prior to the Information Age, wealth was measured in terms of accumulated stuff. You could hoard gold or land or even slaves or women, and the more you had, the richer you were. Information supervenes on physical stuff, namely on computer hardware, but isn’t reducible to that stuff; information is “multiply realizable,” as philosophers put it.

This is why the same program can run simultaneously on many different computers: the program is a code that can be copied any number of times into different hardware. At first glance, the inherent freedom of information is due to the ease with which the code or program can be copied, and that freedom is also what undermines the distinction between public and private goods.

A computer file isn’t like a physical file sitting on your desk, since an informational product is defined by artificial languages and by mathematics which are highly stipulated and even arbitrary. Just as the set of natural numbers is infinite and thus “inexhaustible,” a computer file has no physical boundaries and is restricted only by the program. The computer program, in turn, is bound by the programmer’s goal: the algorithm or code set out by the programmer’s artificial language is a series of steps that, when followed, logically guarantees the desired end point.

For example, you may have an eBook file or a digital photograph or a song file on your computer. Each of those files is likely finite because they’re designed to fulfill the interests of the author, photographer, or musician. But those interests aren’t inherently restrictive. You could write a hundred-page book or a million-page book. At some point, the file would be so large that no computer could store or run it, but that wouldn’t be a limitation of the software.

An informational file is like a mathematical set. If you had to physically house all the animals in the world, you would need an unfeasibly large container; indeed, you would need a planet. But you could arbitrarily define a set as containing all of those animals, with an abstract concept or language, and you could use that set as a representation in a computer program.

This is the upside of the fact that talk is cheap.

The Freedom of Thought

Indeed, the tendency for information to liberate itself, to cross all political and economic borders is due not just to the inexhaustibility of numeric relations, but to the abstractness and perhaps to the rights associated with language and with human thought.

What I mean is that we modern liberals (in the classic sense of “liberal”) assume not only that we have the potential to think of whatever we want, including even of imaginary, counterfactual, or abstract scenarios or objects, but that we have the right to do so. We prize the freedom of thought, and that’s another source of information’s inexhaustibility.

Coders are free to create whatever informational files they want not just because they do so with artificial, mathematical languages that proceed by arbitrary stipulation, but because the freedom of thought which is the source of such programming is morally-protected speech. This is why Silicon Valley, the global center of high technology is located in the most liberal part of the United States, the erstwhile leader of the free world.

It’s possible, though, that the one source of information’s boundlessness and thus of its immunity to being privatized reduces to the other. If we opt for a deflationary, non-platonic theory of mathematics, such as for the view that math is game-like, what’s special about bits as opposed to physical things becomes the subjective aspect of information.

Take, for example, the physicist Lee Smolin’s view of mathematics, as “evoked reality,” as he puts it in The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Mathematical statements are like the rules of chess or of a franchise like Star Wars. The rules themselves are arbitrary, but once stipulated, certain moves in the game or in the fiction become permissible while others are prohibited. There are, then, objectively better or worse moves in chess, given the rules and the goal of playing the game.

Similarly, mathematical systems and artificial languages may be devised for some purpose, such as to manage certain data, to clarify our thinking, or to program a computer. The arbitrariness of those codes is limited by the interests of the users, but those interests in turn are inexhaustible in the sense that although the users may be motivated to think some thoughts rather than others, their freedom to think whatever they want is morally protected in liberal societies. In any case, once stipulated, it’s an objective matter whether these languages will work as intended, as models of nature or as useful software.

Digital Content as the Virtual Presence of Mind

The reason capitalism may not be fit for the digital age, then, is that computers represent almost transparent vessels of human mentality, so the private ownership of information is in conflict with the liberal principle of the freedom of thought.

Compare this with the labour theory of private property, according to which, as John Locke put it, we come to own something in nature when we appropriate it, by “mixing our labour” with it. Locke had in mind the European’s right to own North American land which, he presumed, the indigenous Americans had been wasting, since the Europeans intended to cultivate the land with agriculture.

Take the simple example of picking an apple from a tree. If you picked the apple, the apple becomes your property. The owned item has to be as physical and objective as the labour, which is why slaves and women were considered the properties of their master only to the extent that they weren’t regarded as full-fledged persons.

In that account of private property, labour is work physically done to make use of something natural, meaning something material, mindless, and that hasn’t yet been used by anyone. Women and so-called inferior races had to be equated with animals or with natural objects that could be molded by the master’s intelligent designs.

Of course, we know women and slaves were people all along, but the point is that the capitalist logic was about the ownership and cultivation of nature, where nature was made up of finite resources that could be hoarded or excluded from other people’s use.

Digital technologies seem to exhibit too much mentality, too much ghostlike repeatability and boundlessness to be treated as physical objects, let alone as anything natural. When interacting with computers and with social media, we’re confronting the virtual presence of other people. Liberalism protects the rights of individuals, and if those rights extend to their virtual counterparts and to abstract representations of their thoughts, as in the programmer’s artificial languages that run the Information Age, the notion of owning software should be as repugnant as slavery.

You may be thinking, on the contrary, that since we own ourselves we should be entitled to sell our virtual presence, or that there doesn’t seem to be any obscene servitude in designing a computer game and consenting to other people’s use of it.

Still, there’s something off-putting about that kind of transaction. Notice that digital content is a kind of art. Long before computers, artists “put their heart and soul” into their paintings or poems or operas. These were more or less complex physical works so they weren’t easily copied. But suppose you painted a picture that symbolically captures some of your thoughts and feelings. A little of you is in that painting, as it were. Now suppose the painting is photographed, copied billions of times on the internet, and cut up into pieces and used in countless ways for different purposes that have nothing to do with your original intentions.

Leave aside the issue of copyright. The question Eric Weinstein and critics of capitalism are asking is whether it makes sense to speak of digitized art as being owned by anyone. Perhaps we don’t own ourselves, after all, because we’re subjects and only objects can be owned, given Locke’s imperialist theory of private property.

If people and their thoughts and feelings aren’t the kinds of things that can be owned, and the digital economy is full of virtual instances of such mental contents in the forms of computer files and programs and artificial languages and the internet and social media, maybe it no longer makes sense to speak of ownership in the digital age. Maybe that capitalist mindset is becoming as archaic as feudalism and theocracy.

Pirating a Piece of your Mind

Let’s apply these ideas by focusing on an example. One clear-cut case of information’s tendency to be made into a public good is the pirating of content on the internet. Once you digitize an analogue, physical product such as a song, a photograph, or a novel, one that used to be more easily privatized, you free the content from the restrictions of having to be embodied, as it were.

It’s like separating the spirit from the body so that the ghost can no longer be isolated or imprisoned. The information is all-too easily reproduced in high fidelity. There is no discernible difference between the copies and the original, and the act of copying requires hardly any human labour at all (aside from the commercial labour of producing the hardware): you click a couple of buttons and the computer calculates millions of ones and zeroes and reproduces their proper sequence.

In capitalist terms, information may be protected by copyright law, so some copies amount to stealing what’s privately owned. But that legal treatment is baseless and anachronistic, as we’ve seen. Again, ownership requires something like the mixing of labour with a natural resource, meaning with material stuff that can be carved up, privately stored, and protected. Commercial ownership is that excludability which requires a physical barrier between the owner and the would-be thief, even if that barrier is just the item’s hard-to-copy physicality, its local incarnation in some unique analogue form.

These days, though, there’s as little effort in copying digital content as there is in digitizing analogue content. With relatively few button clicks, you can scan a book or take a photo with a digital camera — again the real work is done by the machines, which you may own. Suppose you photograph a tree and upload the picture to the internet, so that anyone can copy your photo in the blink of an eye. You’ve thereby done about as much physical work as the person who picks an apple from a tree.

Suppose you’re in the wilderness and you pick an apple, but before you can bite into it, someone else comes along and takes the apple from you. Has that person really stolen the apple? Was it yours just because you were the first in reaching up and pulling the apple from the tree? If you think not, you may be intuiting that some physical actions are too trivial to count as work.

More importantly, digital content isn’t a thing in the required sense, meaning it’s “inexhaustible and non-excludable.” So that labour theory of ownership is inapplicable.

That’s likely one of the reasons why there’s so much pirating of content, because we know information isn’t like gold or land or other nonrenewable goods, so we know that that by copying a computer file, we’re not really doing anything comparable to breaking into someone’s house and stealing her jewelry or the paintings hanging on her walls.

The ease of copying comes with the technology, so once you’ve worked hard enough to purchase the hardware, capitalism’s work is done. What’s created or shared with the computer, social media, and the internet has transcended the terms of capitalism, since those terms were grounded in the exploitation of nature in all the latter’s exhaustibility and excludability (physicality, hoardability, and so on).

What we’re doing when we interact with digital content is something much more intimate than the exploitation of material bodies, since we’re accessing extensions of someone’s mind, extensions that have the same apparent nonlocality as the original states of consciousness. In this way, digital content is like a musical performance. If you’re at a concert, you’re not consuming a product so much as interacting almost directly with the musicians. Instead of talking to you and voicing their thoughts, they’re playing instruments and communicating through music.

Likewise, when you watch a recording of a concert on YouTube, you’re not just virtually seeing and hearing what the original audience experienced, but you’re making use of a vessel that has the same ghostly mentality as the musicians’ thoughts which were musically expressed by their instruments. The ease of copying the computer file is analogous to the irrepressibility of human consciousness. Our mind depends on our brain but isn’t confined to that hardware, because we can externalize our thoughts in linguistic or other symbolic forms. Digital symbols happen to be metaphysically apt vessels, since they too are as easily liberated as the minds of consumers in a liberal society that protects our freedom of thought.

Capitalism and Economics against Mind-Body Duality

The problem is that even if the sharing of digital content calls for a post-capitalistic system of exchange, perhaps emphasizing the strength of social relationships rather than the exploitation of finite resources, there could be no post-capitalistic economy, since the software would have to run on physical hardware which could be bought or sold in the classic fashion.

Physical books have presented us with a similar problem for centuries. The symbols used in natural language are digital, so they could be copied. For that reason, the printing press also liberated information and represented a threat to copyright law. Mind you, prior to mass production, there was no prospect of owning the written word. The ancients saw no ethical breach in writing anonymously in the name of a famous person. We would call that plagiarism, because we have the legal regime to protect at least physical products such as books.

The difference, though, is that printing presses are large and require a lot of time and effort to use, and you need a steady supply a paper, so that that technology was fit for commercial purposes. The hardware needed to make digital copies — such as the smartphone — has been democratized. You can hold it in your hand and the consumer’s effort required to upload content for the world to see is negligible. Of course, you need the satellites, the fiber-optic cables, and the companies that maintain the systems; plus, you have to work to become a consumer who can afford the hardware.

We might have expected, then, that our economies would eventually reflect our personal duality. Capitalism’s imperialist pretensions notwithstanding, our minds are freer than our bodies. Capitalism (private ownership, the pursuit of profit by exploitation of limited resources) applies to bodies and to their transformation of the material environment. When applied directly to minds, as in the case of slavery or censorship, the result of capitalism is an obscenity.

Perhaps it’s not just capitalism but economics itself which is irrelevant to how minds as such interact. Economics is “the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, or the material welfare of humankind.” Do minds labour like bodies? Are thoughts and feelings goods or products that can be distributed and consumed like sandwiches? Is a positive state of mind equivalent to our material welfare?

Economics is arguably a pseudoscience even as a treatment of its proper subject matter. But we don’t know what consciousness is. That mystery has driven us to concoct the wildest myths to make sense of our peculiar duality. We thought we were immortal or that the universe was created by someone like us for our benefit.

What we do know is that mental expressions aren’t the same as bodily labour. Consciousness is housed in the brain, which the body “owns” and protects, but thanks to language, consciousness can also be symbolized in external form. That quasi-immortality almost vindicates the religious myths, as though the latter were foreshadowing the advent of the former. Digital content is a piece of our minds and we sell ourselves short whenever we objectify people — or our brainchildren.