The creation of social networks challenges traditional conceptions of intellectual property and this change makes clear how the rights assigned to the ownership of information come into question with the development of digital technology. That social networks violate privacy and survive through using their members information to sell ads is nothing new; the creation of free services enabling anyone with access to them to become an author signals a move away from the productive action of humans and towards the automated surveillance of data collection, collation and retrieval, and this transformation reflects a fundamental shift in our conception of both identity and authorshipwith implications for the idea of intellectual property as well.
The current crisis continues not because those protesting the status quo are lazy, unwilling to work or demanding a government handout; it continues because of a fundamental problem with consumption-based capitalism that has accelerated under digital capitalism: the need for continuous growth. Immaterial production was posed as the solution to this failure when it emerged as a potentially dominant mode of production in the 1980s. The contemporary dominance of immaterialismwhere the physical constraints presented by scarcity are systematically ignored and left out of considerationdepends on agnotology to confuse, deceive and obliviate certainty; with this elimination of the most basic grounds for conclusions and evaluations, the potential for dissent is greatly reduced and the effectiveness of dissent when it does appear is curtailed.
The shift of responsibility for education onto the individual shows the middle and lower classes who aspire to change social position have adopted the ideology of autonomous achievement, through a myopic denial of the governmental role in their social uplift, producing a situation where the shift from public good to private improvement mirrors the self-serving ideology employed by the nineteenth century upper class: it enacts the premise that success was produced through individual labor without assistance. This ideology of personal responsibility for education coupled with an increase in the number of highly skilled, college educated workers both inside and outside the United States has helped create the current liquidity of immaterial labor evident in the rise of off-shoring and globalization.
A highly educated, highly indebted population that still believes that their debts must be repaidthat is willing to sacrifice in order to repay the debts they have incurredmay be the single most important element in maintaining the status quo.
The earlier ability to consider machine labor as an extension of human actionas the mechanical amplification of human laboris replaced by models where the machine does not augment but supplant, in the process apparently removing the human intermediary that historically lies between the work of designer-engineers and the human production required in the fabrication of their plans.
