Cognitive Capitalism
Discussion
Enzo Rullani
Summarized by Matteo Pasquinelli, in: The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage:
"The digital revolution made the reproduction of immaterial objects easier, faster, ubiquitous and almost free. But as the Italian economist Enzo Rullani points out, within cognitive capitalism, "proprietary logic does not disappear but has to subordinate itself to the law of diffusion." Intellectual property (and so Rent) is no longer based on space and objects but on time and speed. Apart from copyright there are many other modes to extract rent. In his book Economia della conoscenza Rullani writes that cognitive products easy to reproduce have to start a process of diffusion as soon as possible in order to maintain control over it. As an entropic tendency affects any cognitive product, it is not recommended to invest on a static proprietary rent. More specifically there is a rent produced on the multiplication of the uses and a rent produced on the monopoly of a secret. Two opposite strategies: the former is recommended for cultural products like music, the latter for patents. Rullani is inclined to suggest that free multiplication is a vital strategy within cognitive capitalism, as the value of knowledge is fragile and tends to decline. Immaterial commodities (that populate any spectacular, symbolic, affective, cognitive space) seem to suffer of a strong entropic decay of meaning. At the end of the curve of diffusion a banal destiny is waiting for any meme, especially in today's emotional market that constantly tries to sell unique and exclusive experiences.
For Rullani the value of a knowledge (extensively of any cognitive product, artwork, brand, information) is given by the composition of three drivers: the value of its performance and application (v); the number of its multiplications and replica (n); the sharing rate of the value among the people involved in the process (p). Knowledge is successful when it becomes self-propulsive and pushes all the three drivers: 1) maximising the value, 2) multiplying effectively, 3) sharing the value that is produced. Of course in a dynamic scenario a compromise between the three forces is necessary, as they are alternative and competitive to each other. If one driver improves, the others get worse. Rullani's model is fascinating precisely because intellectual property has no central role in extracting surplus. In other words the rent is applied strategically and dynamically along the three drivers, along different regimes of intellectual property. Knowledge is therefore projected into a less fictional cyberspace, a sort of invisible landscape where cognitive competition should be described along new space-time coordinates. Rullani describe his model as 3D but actually it is 4-dimensional as it runs especially along time.
The dynamic model provided by Rullani is more interesting than for instance Benkler's plain notion of "social production" but it is not yet employed by radical criticism and activism. What is clear and important in his perspective is also that the material can not be replaced by the immaterial despite the contemporary hypertrophy of signs and digital enthusiasm. There is a general misunderstanding about cognitive economy as an autonomous and virtuous space. On the contrary, Rullani points out that knowledge exists only through material vectors. The nodal point is the friction between the free reproducibility of knowledge and the non-reproducibility of the material. The immaterial generates value only if it grants meaning to a material process. A music CD for example has to be physically produced and physically consumed. We need our body and especially our time to produce and consume music. And when the CD vector is dematerialised thanks to the evolution of digital media into P2P networks, the body of the artist has to be engaged in a stronger competition. Have digital media galvanised more competition or more cooperation? An apt question for today's internet criticism." (http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf)
More Information
Check of P2P Foundation blog archive for more articles on cognitive capitalism.
Self-organisation and cooperation in cognitive capitalism, special issue of Solaris magazine, at http://biblio-fr.info.unicaen.fr/bnum/jelec/Solaris/d05/5introduction.html , http://biblio-fr.info.unicaen.fr/bnum/jelec/Solaris/d05/5link-pezet.html
Key English-language Books to Read
The theory of cognitive capitalism has its roots in mostly French and Italian thinkers. Therefore, we are able to present a number of specific books in French, but English books on the subject are less precise in regard of this concept.
Book in progress by Adam Arvidsson: The Ethical Economy Book Project
Jeremy Rifkin. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience
(what if the new capitalism produced a new kind of feudalism? Indeed, as products are increasingly replaced by immaterial experiences, and are licensed rather than sold, then this means that consumers will no longer ‘own’ anything, merely a right to use it, and that those without means will be excluded from access to these networks)
Nick Dyer-Whitheford. Cyber-Marx, cycles and circuits of struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Univ. of Illinois Pr., 1999.
(“well-researched overview on contemporary Marxist responses to the information age" - Soderbergh copyleft essay)
Class Warfare in the Information Age. Michael Perelman. Palgrave.
(“shows how class conflict remains a contemporary issue")
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. By Richard Sennett. Norton & Co, 1998.
(vignettes which show the contradictions inherent in the postfordist model of capitalism, and the high personal price to be paid by its employees / French: “Le Travail sans Qualite", Albin Michel, 2000)