Everything for free

A day will come when farmers, too, celebrate extreme productivity, bumper output and pricelessness

Real Life’s Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra are witnessing some of the fiercest clashes between farmers and local administrations. Farmers are suffering because prices have crashed after a bumper production. There is a glut in the market. 

It’s funny that at a time when Real Life policy-makers are mulling how to prevent such a glut in the future, guys in the virtual world are marvelling at it, even thinking of a post-democratic society based on it. 

The website of Commons Transition says, “First of all, these (post-democratic) societies are not democracies. Very simply because democracy, the market, and hierarchy are modes of allocation of scarce resources. In hierarchy, our superiors decide; in the market, prices decide; in a democracy, ‘we’ decide. But where resources are abundant, as they are with immaterial knowledge, code, and design, which can be copied and shared at a marginal cost, they (hierarchy, market, democracy) are truly unnecessary. Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.”

The abundance of resources it talks about results from widespread copying and pasting of immaterial (virtual) knowledge at marginal cost (which is the cost of producing additional units — that is, excluding the initial investment and overhead costs). Suppose I produce an e-book or create a virtual chair, I do so at a certain initial investment, but the cost of producing additional units or marginal cost would be zero since copying-pasting of immaterial knowledge wouldn’t cost a thing, owing to the efficiency and productivity achieved by software and the internet. No wonder, this has given rise to the free-download culture of the internet. The plummeting marginal costs of generating information have given rise to sites like Library Genesis and Sci-Hub where internet users bypass the traditional commercial channels of the market, use the distributed, collaborative nature of the internet to create economies of scale, and start sharing ideas, information, and books with one another, skipping all the middle men, mark-ups, and margins on the traditional capitalist value chain, and by doing so, bring the marginal cost of producing additional units (books) to near zero. 

Sci-Hub in particular has been in the news lately because academic publishers are trying very hard to shut the website. It’s funny how capitalists such as academic publishers pursue greater efficiencies to lower marginal costs of production in order to be more competitive, but fear the same marginal costs of production when they start approaching zero. Napster was an example. Formed in 1999, it allowed people to share music with one another for free. Within a few years, other file-sharing networks followed. As a result, ownership of property (CDs) fell and access to online music libraries rose. Markets succumbed to networks. Capitalists fear the day when their relentless pursuit of productivity drives down the marginal costs of production to near zero, making goods and services essentially free. When most things become nearly free, profits disappear and markets lose their hold over scarcity and thereby their ability to profit from another’s dependency. With scarcity being replaced by abundance, thanks to extreme economic productivity, everyone can secure much of what they need without having to pay for it.

Custodians.online’s letter in solidarity with so-called pirate websites Library Genesis and Sci-Hub says, “We demonstrate daily, and on a massive scale, that the (capitalist) system is broken. We share our writing secretly behind the backs of our publishers, circumvent paywalls to access articles and publications, digitise and upload books to libraries. This is the other side of 37 per cent profit margins (reportedly of Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher): our Knowledge Commons grows in the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge. To be a custodian is, de facto, to download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitise, to archive, to maintain libraries, to make them accessible.” 

Writers talking above see themselves as significant contributors to the post-capitalist free culture of the internet. Perhaps, a day will come in Real Life when farmers, too, celebrate extreme productivity, bumper output, and pricelessness. 

ashish.sharma@bsmail.in