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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
new policies?
So what does this mean for top-down policy making?
Of course it realizes the crisis in the public domain in the high tech western nations,
the loss of belief in its integrity by citizens, the huge agency through the Internet,
mobile phones and a growing number of open source hardware projects such as the
Open Source Car, openmoko and bricophone (open mobiles), the RepRap (open
source 3D printer). According to Neil Gershenfeld from Fablabs prices of lasercutters
and 3D printers will go down so rapidly (already at 20 000 euros) to household price
level. Thus personal manufacturing and fabrication of goods becomes possible. What
does it mean in terms of patents and IP if you can download songs on your very own
handmade iPod?
Its current reaction to this threat is overregulation at a personal level and in
everyday surroundings. Not only is smoking itself somewhat considered as a personal
threat to others and yourself, in a country like Holland it is even regulated where you
can smoke in the open air at train stations – near a smoking pole. Manufacturing,
keeping a shop, doing business, building on old forms of knowledge that is paid for by
public money (universities, polytechnics, government agencies), all this becomes
increasingly difficult as more rules and regulations accompany every step in the
processes that want to innovate and take risk, and more and more ideas, knowledge
and data gets branded as IP of some kind.
Much more productive, but much more difficult too, is for policy to realize that its
greatest assets are its ways of working, ways of building consensus, ways of creating
formats of organizational behaviour. In between the growing realm of citizens who
start doing all kinds of things for themselves in the messiness of everyday life and the
structure of formal government, a space is opening up and filling rapidly with all
kinds of informal structures and networks, lots of agency, very little accountability.
Intervening is this realm through regulation will fail by default, as with Cradle to
Cradle (the new much hyped but very intriguing book on sustainability), I argue that
regulation is always a system failure as consensus should have been scripted into the
design. This new space needs ways of working that script solidarity, are transparent,
foster accountability and invite critical enquiry. That is the new role of policy and by
definition, the new role of the state.
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