http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/ Jon Lebkovsky: You were among the first authors to put substantial works online as "literary freeware." What do you think of Creative Commonas and Free Culture - threat, or menace? Stimulus for innovation or communist conspiracy? Bruce Sterling: Well, Free Culture is not a "communist conspiracy." A communist conspiracy would want to nationalize intellectual property through the dictatorship of the proletariat (assuming that it recognized intellectual property as something other than "theft".) I would classify Creative Commons as an ingenious if somewhat complicated scheme which may or may not prove to have legs as an actual workaday institution. All these copyleft schemes have to involve somebody who cares enough to keep track of who copylefted what under what circumstances. Creative Commons aren't public domain, they're not abandonware. They're gonna require some kind of bureaucracy and some kind of grievance squad. That makes them vulnerable, and with the passage of time, possibly top-heavy. I wonder, for instance, if Creative Commons couldn't be harassed to death by a deliberate blizzard of SCO-style petty lawsuits. I also wonder if their zealots might just get bored and despair over the dullness of their bookkeeping when they expected the Creative Revolution, baby. As far as the "threat or menace" aspect goes, the menace is not in some Saddam dictatorship of creative Marxist-Lessigists. The danger is in the general collapse of law and order and its replacement by nothing in particular. I'm getting worried that the WTO - WIPO regime, the general respect for law and order in the realm of intellectual property, may just collapse worldwide. It may fail through imperial overstretch and get nibbled to death by global guerrillas. It may be that as the means of production get offshored into areas like China and India, where there traditionally has not been little respect for IP, the West's standards of behavior may simply be ignored. That fish is rotting from the head down. If the USA is itself widely regarded as an outlaw state, why should anybody pay even lip service to the IP interests of its multinationals? That system cannot be enforced with cruise missiles; the global populace in general has to agree that the scheme is legitimate and just and the best way to produce prosperity. Otherwise they just pirate stuff and buy fakes. People don't physically have to pay money for IP; they're merely required to do it. So trying to drag money out of IP means imposing a regulatory framework on globalization. That's not easy. It's like trying to dam up black water. The WTO doesn't run the world. Seen from inside, they're very rickety, balky and feeble. There's just not a lot of enforcement power there. Their appeal is mostly moral, believe it or not. Global law and order of any kind is in deep trouble now. We could find ourselves living in a "failed globe", where states fail all over the place, including the USA. Then most everybody would find themselves living in the way that the planet's majority have always lived. And that's not the "American Way," that's the third-world way. Instead of a thriving Group of 7 with its vast tinkertoy of advanced-state infrastructure and legalisms, we could find that the 21st century globe looks a lot more like Brazil. Like Turkey. China. India. Big, ramshackle, semi-stable, randomly violent, mostly poor, amazingly corrupt. Given that Creative Commons is a lawyer's invention and wondrously and nitpickingly legalistic, I wonder what kind of future Creative Commons would have in such a world. I tend to think that people would just shrug and forget it was around. inkwell.vue 234: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2005 #40 of 74: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 07 Jan 2005 (02:43 PM) Don't Americans seem to believe that we've already has a collapse of law and order, to which the respond by electing candidates who promise more social control? Isn't that what follows a perceived social chaos - an authoritarian backlash? inkwell.vue 234: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2005 #41 of 74: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 07 Jan 2005 (04:50 PM) As far as I can figure it, that's in reverse order. I mean, in the Balkans, it was Tito, an authoritarian of the first order, whose social order went to pieces. Then there was some nasty Balkan phony-war terror-war bloodletting that looked very rigorous and tough-guy, but was just a front for the well-nigh complete ethical, political, military, economic and social rot in Yugoslavia. The place imploded. It's statelets now. Bosnia, Herzegovina, Kosova, I don't even know what the proper name is for those entities. UN protectorates? Global colonies? NATO hot potatoes that are now somewhat cooler EU potatoes? We haven't even invented the terminology. We're still trying to pretend that we can state-build them back to the way they were. The late Zoran Djindjic kinda figured that after Milosevic was deposed, he'd act like the take-charge revolutionary leader and shake some law and order back into Serbian government. But the biggest smuggling gang in town just shot Djindjic in the back and he died on the spot. His successors are a lot more circumspect. They know that the state can be whacked in the streets by the gangs and that nobody that matters will turn a hair. The situation is Serbia is actually kind of stable. It doesn't have a grim, violent feeling. The police are not feared by the populace. You don't see blatant acts of race-hate. It's just that the place is profoundly crooked. It's like a world capital of black globalization. I know this all sounds pretty grim, farfetched, alien and freaky to most Americans, but that's more or less what happened to our own dark twin, the "Soviet Union." You remember them, that other continental superpower full of white guys and bristling with military power? They alienated all their allies, bogged down fighting Moslems, went broke, and then collapsed like a burst tire. People still call that area "the former Soviet Union", what, fifteen years after the thing died? That's like calling Texas "the former Confederate State" in about 1880! I think people instinctively call it "the former Soviet Union" because there's so little national character to the diffuse entities that appeared after that collapse. Putin makes authoritarian noises and can bust the heads of some of his moguls, but the guy's got no economy. There's no rule of law to speak of. The Russians pipe oil and gas. That's about it. They're a rentier enterprise. Serbia looks like a jolly vacation spot compared to the Russian situation. They're losing half a million people a year in Russia. Their demographics are catastrophic. You'd think they'd pick their socks up and patch a civilization together, but they're dying off like the buffalo. By the middle of the century half the Russian ethnic group will be gone. Just, you know, Gone With the Wind. Nobody's killing them. They're not being invaded by tyrants. Nobody's putting them in camps. But whatever the hell it is that they've got: the Disorder, the Decline -- man, that stuff is fatal. It's more serious to the health of nations than a major shooting war. They're in a tailspin. You think they'd get all better if they elected and installed a bunch of Republicans? Or for that matter, Democrats?