An anthropologist in the world revolution

The world historical moment you live in does not need you. You can engage with it or you can hide from it. We are living through a revolutionary period of the machine age—the digital revolution in communications. Here I sketch the significance of this moment in human history and then describe my own practical engagement with it before examining the process in more abstract and world historical terms. 1. A summary history of the growth of the internet; 2. My experience of life in this phase of the machine revolutions; 3. Anthropology online: The Open Anthropology Cooperative between networking and academia. 4. The rise of the corporations; 5. Intellectual property: a political history.[1]

The digital revolution: a brief history

Computers have been with us for over 70 years, television for a bit longer and telephones for twice as long. These technologies converged in a worldwide network of communications, the internet. It is a conceptual unity like “the world market”. Market transactions increasingly take place on the internet. The big innovation of the World Wide Web in 1994 was the move from words and numbers to visual images. Transmissions flow through an evolving network of satellites and cable grids.

The internet belonged for decades to a strategic complex of military, scientific and business interests in the US and Europe. These cliques lent the medium its style and content at first. It was technical, closed and clubby. When the internet went public in 1991, there were only three million users. In the next five years this increased to 100 million. This figure reached 5 billion in 2020 out of almost 8 billion.[2] No previous technology has diffused so fast.

Extrapolating from experience is useless. Guessing what happens next is a challenge to empiricism. Iron smelting was first discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean over 3,000 years ago.[3] Small quantities were used for ornaments worn by the ruling class. Then iron weapons gave some groups a military advantage. Iron found its most general application some centuries later: as tools used by common people to produce food and manufactures. At first, iron was a symbolic and practical prop for the dominance of a military caste. Something similar could be said about the internet in the Cold War.

The digital revolution is driven by changes in the size, cost and speed of information-processing machines. Speed is now measured as millions of instructions per second (MIPS). The world’s first modern computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), was built in the late 1940s. It cost millions of dollars, was 50 metres wide and 3 metres tall and processed 5,000 instructions per second. 25 years later, an Intel chip, 12 mm square, cost $200 and processed 0.06 MIPS. Pentium 4 chips processed 10,000 MIPS in 2003 and some chips passed 50,000 MIPS in 2008. The fastest computing speed in 2019 was 148 petaFLOPS.[4] In 1980 copper wires transmitted information at a printed page a second. Now hair-thin optical fibres carry over a million encyclopaedia volumes per second. Modems recently took an hour to download a five-minute video. Broadband technology now performs this task in a few seconds.

The world revolution and me

The new communications technologies blur the boundaries of academic disciplines. They transform the content of education and spawn new genres of research. They demand fresh intellectual strategies. The universities impede our ability to engage with all this. Anthropology has not yet grasped the potential of this new world. We should rethink who we wish to address, how and where.

We have launched a world revolution as far-reaching as the invention of agriculture. It is a machine revolution, of course. It is a social revolution, the formation of world society with universal means of communication. It is a financial revolution, the detachment of the virtual money circuit from production. It is an existential revolution, transforming what it means to be human -- how individuals participate in humanity. Everything we have done before seems like its prehistory. Oswald Spengler said that the world historical moment you are born into will carry on with or without you. But he asked his readers, “Do you have the courage to embrace it?” So too with this revolution: you can jump in or hide from it. Everyone’s path is unique, yet the revolution has discernible outlines.

I never warmed to the typewriter. Whiting out mistakes was messy. I depended on fierce Scottish matrons to type up my hand-written manuscripts. We both knew where the power was. With word-processing in the early 1980s, I seized my chance for liberation. I was an artisan, designing layout and content. Email was an oral/written hybrid, between a letter and a phone call. I still love its fluency. I next produced beautiful pamphlets through desk-top publishing. The roles of editor and publisher were added to my craft identity. Then I started a mailing list, the amateur anthropology association (small-triple-a). It flourished for two years.

Desk-top publishing was alright, but the challenge was distribution. Waiting for someone to find a booklet on a shop shelf was old school. We considered reviving the eighteenth-century subscriber system with an online data base. But I was committed to print publishing.

The World Wide Web made the internet more visual, personal and interactive. I chaired a university committee exploring uses of IT for teaching and research. Some said that Cambridge had no place in this new world. The former polytechnics had more experience with online techniques. But Cambridge has treasures that could become an internet resource. The digital revolution is not linear. Everyone enters it with their own bundle of advantages and drawbacks. The technology evolves. Early users become over-adapted to older techniques. Latecomers use software needing less specialist knowledge. The machine revolution is a river. You cannot step into the same one twice.

What could I give the young geeks who helped me find a toehold in this revolution? I settled on “history”: I was born in the war and have a vision of history that they don’t. I developed as a network entrepreneur. My activities had no money or prestige. Participants needed to do something they couldn’t do elsewhere. They might try out graphic design. I got an amateur product, but it was free. When they had to, they would leave. The value added by the group must be cool! I adapted online discoveries to normal academic practice. The two spheres fed each other.

After I moved to Paris, I wanted to sum up thirty years of teaching and point forward too. I asked what would interest future generations about us. Obviously, the digital revolution. What we do now will have consequences for them. I found an old lecture about money and wrote The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World about how the digital revolution was shaping money and exchange. I built a website to promote this book. Without helpers I would be nowhere. But I now do far more for myself.

The social media revolution used the excess bandwidth left over from the dot com bust. This was my chance. I used Twitter to develop as an editor. I sent economic journalism from Europe to American traders, gold bugs and currency freaks. I met interesting anthropologists. I honed my subediting skills. Social bookmarking turns me on. Knowledge before was classified by experts; each bit of information had its unique place in a folder. Tagging allows us to mark something we like or find useful. Software locates connections for you. We generate the categories now. Google’s algorithms are already obsolete.

Facebook gave me a networking platform like no other. I published political and economic analysis. I wasn’t interested in personal trivia. Readers expected interesting material from me. When the malfeasance of Zuckerberg’s empire became obvious, I quit. Big Tech is ruining our ability to make society for ourselves. Convenience shouldn’t beat working for the internet we want. Google and Amazon are next on my list. I have posted many papers on academia.edu. I follow strangers there who show interest in my work.

The internet greatly increases my intellectual efficiency. I used to spend a day lifting heavy books in Cambridge University library to find references for an article. Now I get them online in seconds. I can translate an article from eight European languages in under a minute. Kindle is the biggest innovation for me since email and websites. I can highlight notes, send them to myself by email and transfer them directly to a document. Wikipedia is our library of Alexandria and universally accessible. My young friends are cutting edge and I am not. It’s all a bloody miracle for me. I can’t get enough of it. Bring on the virtual revolution!

Students, readers and those we study will expect us to engage them through the new media. We must move from monologue to dialogue, from guild disciplines for adolescents to lifetime self-learning. The universities lag behind students in media literacy; they will soon be known as “late academia”.

Anthropology online: between social networks and academia

Discussion about Open Access in contemporary anthropology is mostly American, where the contradictions are acute. It involves resistance to privatization of the commons, an aspect of the intellectual property wars. A narrower issue is how to make research publications freely available without undermining their role as cultural capital in academic careers. Unemployed young researchers can’t afford to pay for information and yet they hope to find academic employment someday. The contradiction is between the intellectual commons and owning ideas as private property.

The situation in American anthropology was made worse by the policy of the AAA to elevate private production for profit above sharing knowledge with the public.[5] I recall Marx’s early polemics against restricting peasants’ access to fallen wood in the Westphalian forests. OA activists today can’t fight privatization with his intensity because they have already bought into an academic career as individual owners. American anthropologists rarely consider if the French, for example, have some interesting responses to this problem. Is OA an issue in Brazil or Scandinavia, in Japan or India? Language barriers also restrict public access. English is not universal. Now I have a German translator based on artificial intelligence feedback processes that is far superior to the algorithms of early social media.[6] This is the next stage of the revolution: an article in any of the major European languages translated readably in under a minute, with Mandarin and Arabic to come.

In May 2009, casual griping spread to Twitter, where a loose network of anthropologists had formed. Before long, there were quasi-revolutionary suggestions to start an open, less bureaucratic and more inclusive worldwide community of anthropologists. Twitter was ideal for this, but more space was needed if we were to build a global network of anthropologists. Justin Shaffner and I set up a forum on my website to find a name and purpose for this proposed collective. Participants brainstormed about two issues: “structure” and “function”. What would the organization look like and what would it do? One suggestion was that “we should offer a structure that is open enough to become whatever it will. Every member should be able to take an initiative. There is no need to get bogged down in unnecessary voting; if something needs to get done and you can do it, then go for it”. We settled on the Open Anthropology Cooperative as its name.

We moved to the Ning platform and then tried to catch up with uncontrolled expansion. The OAC aspired to global scope and no hierarchy. Its model negated formal academia’s typical malfunctions. This proved to be both liberating and stifling. We made a lot of mistakes and some of the founders left in a huff. The OAC’s members came from over fifty countries. We hosted specialist groups in German, Norwegian, Italian, French, Russian, Georgian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. Yet the trend was towards the online dominance of native English-speakers.

The OAC never settled on a “brand”, but there was no parallel in world anthropology for the interaction offered there. Fran Barone and I wrote a book chapter on our experience. Building an open network brings complications. Faced with an unexpected flood of enrolments, we never solved tough problems of organization and site navigation. We had to moderate admissions in order to control spammers and trolls. Any member could open up a discussion group, but many soon neglected what they began. The result was proliferating pages with no recognizable shape. We allowed too many decisions to be debated openly. We opted for a platform that allowed newcomers to get started without any preparation; and we conceded control to them.

Egalitarianism meant that we didn’t pay enough attention to leadership. We mixed an academic network with social media without resolving the contradictions between them. Administrators were mainly graduate students writing a thesis. Anthropologists already find it hard to make their public presence felt. Newcomers were astonished by the vitality and diversity of the site, only to discover that finding your way around was hard and substantial areas seemed to be dead.

Professionals, students and outsiders interacted freely there without central direction. We accumulated a remarkable archive of spontaneous commentary, visual and literary artefacts, plus thousands of personal pages. We tried to establish a repository for research and teaching materials but lacked the manpower. The OAC Press publishes working papers, classical texts and book reviews online; and we held successful interdisciplinary seminars lasting two weeks. They replicate the familiar academic model, but with more time for reading and reflection before commenting. We opened an OAC page on Facebook. Membership is more diverse and less academic there, much younger on average, especially from India. Posts are shorter, more suited to grabbing readers’ passing attention. By 2019, OAC Facebook had 14,000 members and OAC Ning seemed stuck at 8,000. I resigned from the admins team; Avi Khalil and Justin Shaffner moved the main site,[7] stored the Ning page as a static archive for 2009-2019 and explored new experimental forms. OAC Facebook carried on as before.

Anthropology did not help us think through online problems theoretically and practically. We meticulously documenting bits of the world and can’t catch up with its movement. Its priority was never to change the world. We can’t even solve issues that our grounded humanism should train us for. The fastest-growing sector of world trade is in cultural commodities – entertainment, education, media, information services – increasingly online. Everywhere sclerotic corporations are outsourcing to smaller flexible units or being replaced by them. The need for lifelong self-learning is met only by individual initiative; and anthropology’s holistic approach ought to be well-suited to it. With imagination and less dependence on the universities, anthropology could enter a golden age. But we still privilege research publications over teaching, the Faustian contract of last century.

With very few exceptions, such as Michael Wesch at Kansas State, we don’t ask what the people want or how to give it to them. The spirit of academic bureaucracy killed the OAC, even as we tried to escape from it. Luddite universities regard online activities as a hobby, not serious work.[8] The OAC proved that anthropologists cope well with virtual worlds. We were artisans, piecing together technologies for chatting, learning, teaching and sharing. We aspired to be transparent and encouraged informal discussion and formal debate. We were an anomaly in a tidy classification system, a compromised public island. We wanted to avoid the academy’s formality; but most members worked in universities.

Intellectual snobbery and populist rhetoric blocked learning from the online stars. Yet social media’s preoccupation with followers and friends reflects an important development in society. When the Latins found being a disorganized rabble a handicap, they formed three named groups (“tribes”). These sacrificed a cow and "distributed" the meat among participants.[9] They made ad hoc alliances with neighbours and called them socius, the whole thing societas. Anyone under attack assumed leadership and the rest followed them. But this was transient and contingent, like the social media today. Society as a bounded hierarchy with a centre was a medieval French idea. Anthropologists should reflect more on the fast-breaking features of society online.

We are losing concepts like “culture” and “ethnography” to better-organized disciplines.[10] Anthropologists do have something to offer the public. We are just terrible at communicating it. Fear of “branding” anthropology and “looking like Facebook” undermined the OAC project on Ning. Our web-based activities came to resemble office politics. We suffered from the same prejudices that hobbled the universities. Creating new social forms is hard. Radical ideas are often subverted by unconsciously held older forms. The OAC was a new social form. It allowed Asian women graduate students to express themselves more freely than at home. We encouraged students to network with established academics. We gave outsiders access to information, discussions and writing normally locked up behind university doors or pay walls. But we lacked a big idea and old social forms lurked beneath the surface. Invention and self-expression dwindled over time.

Even so, we contributed to public anthropology by providing a global medium for exploring anthropology’s potential to change the world. That world is still searching for democracy. The OAC has been and still is part of that. We didn’t draw on anthropology to fulfil the OAC’s promise. Intellectual life is intrinsically individualistic. We may think of ourselves as social creatures, but they only hand out brains one at a time. Collaboration is strong in the hard sciences. Universities have always depended on informal cultural commons: teaching, seminars, conferences, sharing ideas, access to libraries and so on. Everyone wants personal recognition; but, until the 1950s, this came second to academic life as a community of scholars, teachers and their students.

The Cold War and the need to restore home food supplies after the war boosted research on armaments and agriculture. Public money was pumped into universities for research. Big Pharma funded research on chemicals. Student enrolments took off in the 1960s and universities became big business. The late twentieth-century university was the state’s main research arm and a mass production line for workers in bureaucracies. Academics, like monks, always ruled their own institutions; but this expansion gave power to administrators. Research now dominated. The humanities and social sciences didn’t have much to offer, but they jumped onto the bandwagon.

The 1970s culminated in Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberal counter-revolution against post-war social democracy. Pseudo-markets now based academic assessment on “objective” indicators like research publications. Bureaucracies became more interventionist. Wholesale corporatization of university cultures followed. What was left of academic community was destroyed by the growing gap between a few established professors who took leave often and a reserve army of precarious young teachers (“adjuncts”). The publishing oligopoly exhausted library budgets with their over-priced journals, while the academics competed to be published in them. Everyone agrees that the contents are worthless and mostly unread. Faced with the digital revolution, most academics zealously upheld a feudal private property system that subverted their places of work.

Even so, we are living through a genuine revolution in the production and dissemination of knowledge. The vast reserve army of graduate students well understands the freedom and opportunities afforded by digital commons; they accept in principle the system of private property and competitive markets but maintain a critical attitude to them. The AAA is an endless source for such scepticism. Yet its critics are tied to the labour market it serves. At least the AAA is 100% for the private property system.

Academics have been losing a class war for half a century. We are “rebels without a clue” (Tom Petty) and have no idea how we got into this situation or how to get out of it. This makes us easy pickings. Wedded to bourgeois ideology and ignorant of guides from Marcel Mauss to C.L.R. James, we can’t preserve the social conditions for our individuality and have sold our commons for the illusion of personal advancement. Young researchers, desperate to gain a toehold in the academy, did not bring about this situation. Those of us who got in when the going was good acquiesced in the destruction of what we were given.

Our main strategy must be to take advantage of the social and technical possibilities afforded by the digital revolution. This will require other means of economic support. It makes no sense to bank on an academic job for life these days. But every serious online initiative I know was compromised by attitudes and habits formed in the academy. The main clients for any anthropological forum are graduate students and they want to conserve a status quo they hope to join -- while nurturing half-hearted attitudes of rebellion.

I don’t disparage academic work. I have devoted my life to it. But anthropology was born as part of a democratic project and the academy is now gripped by a coercive bureaucracy. I have a pseudo-Maoist slogan: walk on two legs (it’s better than standing on one leg and falling over). By all means keep one foot in the academy, if you can, but don’t settle for the status quo and keep the other foot in the market, moving forward while shifting your balance. “What the people want” is the slogan of a genuine democracy. It is not something the privileged give to the needy, but we must find out what it is, if we aspire to be socially useful. It bears repeating that anthropology was originally a project to discover what human beings in common in order to replace arbitrary inequality with a democratic constitution.

The rise of the corporations

Neoliberal globalization undermined the strong version of national capitalism that prevailed after 1945. By the millennium, the nation-state’s detractors could argue that national governments are corrupt and ineffective; national laws are irrelevant and unenforceable; national citizens are lazy and disaffected. What other powers exist in our world? We must begin with the American Empire. The free-market idea is a rhetorical fig leaf for this empire. Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic underestimate its strengths. Europeans play up every sign of American hubris, incompetence and malfeasance.

American global hegemony rests on world market share, weapons and bases, the world currency, intellectual property and Big Tech. The US invented and still dominates the Internet, which supplies much of the world’s hardware, software, content and giant firms.[11] The American Empire today rests on mercantilism, militarism, financial monopoly, private property in ideas and the digital revolution.

The second force is the move towards regional trade federations. The European Union is the largest, followed by ASEAN, Mercosul, NAFTA and the African Union. China and Russia challenge US hegemony. Transnational corporations, however, pose the main threat to nation-states. To understand this, we must grasp the evolution of private property.[12]

We still think of private property as belonging to living persons and oppose private and public spheres on that basis. But what makes property private is holding exclusive rights against the world. Abstract entities like governments and corporations, as well as individuals, can thus hold private property. States and corporations have acquired the property rights of individuals. Private property in this form does not shore up liberal democracy. It favours totalitarian bureaucracy and always has. Personal identity is forced into categories devised by impersonal institutions. We are understandably confused by this, especially since the corporations’ rise to public power rests on collapsing the difference between real and artificial persons in economic law. This constitutes an obstacle to the practice of democracy and to thinking about it. Sadly, many intellectuals obscure the distinction between living persons and social abstractions.

Private property has not only evolved from personal ownership to corporate forms, but its main reference has shifted from “real” to “intellectual” property, that is from material objects to ideas. The digital revolution has led to the economic preponderance of information services whose reproduction and transmission is nearly costless. If I steal your cow, its loss is material, since only one of us can benefit from its milk. But if I copy a CD or DVD, I am denying no-one access to it. Yet corporate lobbyists depend on this misleading analogy to influence courts and legislators to treat duplication of their “property” as “theft” or even “piracy.”

The term “information feudalism” is apt for all this.[13] Human work not long ago was conceived of as collective physical energy, as “hands”. The internet has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Labour is increasingly understood as individual creativity, as subjectivity. This shift has been captured by big money when claiming that “intellectual property” must be regulated in its owner’s interest. The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is not just about conserving the earth’s natural resources or public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The large corporations now assert their exclusive ownership of what was shared culture to which all had free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought over music, movies, literature, software, GMOs, pharmaceuticals, the internet and the universities with little awareness of the common cause they share.

Where did all this come from?[14] Investors were once personally responsible for a firm’s debts. In 1580, Queen Elizabeth of England granted “limited freedom from liability” to The Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake. She was the largest shareholder. Investors were now liable to repay only the amount of their investment. Creditors had to absorb the losses. The returns were 5,000 percent and the queen was well-pleased. Drake was a national hero, but the world called him a pirate. The business model they invented underlies the modern corporation.

The Dutch then dominated world trade. In 1600 the queen granted a charter to the East India Company in the City of London. Its ties to national government were always close. The Company financed James Cook’s explorations of the Pacific and controlled trade with the American colonies. By the 1770s it was almost bankrupt. Dutch traders and local smugglers sold cheaper tea to the Americans. The 1773 Tea Act exempted the Company from taxes on exports to America with a tax refund on 17 million pounds of unsold tea. It could now undercut retail prices in America, where resentment fuelled the Boston tea party.

Thomas Jefferson saw three main threats to democracy: governing elites, organized religion and commercial monopolies.[15] He called the last “pseudo-aristocrats” and “monarchists". He wanted freedom from monopoly in the Bill of Rights but failed. Corporations then sought the constitutional rights of individual citizens but were denied. After the Civil War the railroads tried again. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed former slaves equal protection under the laws. The railroads used this to sue local authorities when regulations singled them out. It created “different classes of persons”. Corporate personhood was widely debated.

The corporations finally won in the 1886 Supreme Court judgment on Santa Clara County vs. the Southern Pacific Railroad. The latter was being sued for back taxes. It claimed it was a person entitled to equal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court’s written judgment says:

“The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Many businesses took advantage of this ruling in the next few decades, but only a few former slaves did.” [16]

The world’s three largest corporations today are Chinese banks. Finance dominates the top 150 transnational corporations. The top 100 non-financial corporations are over half (56) European. The United States (23), Japan (10) and China (5) follow. Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Korea and Malaysia have one each. The drive for independence would have corporations the only citizens in world society. “Share-holder value” is no longer the rationale for corporate behaviour. “Corporate social responsibility” is taking its place.[17] National capitalism, they whisper in secluded places, is decadent and must be replaced. After structural adjustment policies dismantled restrictions on capital flows in the 1980s, the corporations turned to investment abroad. They want nation-states to police international laws administered by international organizations.

Companies control the marketing of their brand, outsource production, logistics and much else. Why have state laws, when the world needs moral law? “Corporate social responsibility” informs internal management practice. It also negotiates relations between firms and society. This corporate drive for world domination is celebrated annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Celebrities pay homage there.

Intellectual property

Private property today is mainly intellectual property.[18] The phrase was invented by Lysander Spooner. He was an old-fashioned liberal philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century: individualist, anarchist, abolitionist, an American Proudhon. He was often broke. Spooner wanted to guarantee a living for mental workers. Property traditionally belonged to living persons. But holding exclusive rights makes property private. Abstractions (states and business corporations) can hold private property. We are understandably confused by this. Private property has evolved from individual ownership to collective forms. It has also shifted from “real” to “intellectual” property, from material objects to ideas.

The digital revolution has promoted information services whose transmission is almost costless. Copyright, patents and trademarks have assumed paramount significance in the world economy. The law of real property is, by a sleight of hand, used to protect intellectual property. If I steal your cow, its loss is material -- only one of us can use its milk. But if I copy a DVD, I deny no-one access. Yet corporate lobbyists treat duplication of their “property” as “theft” or even “piracy.” The US was born in resistance to corporate monopoly. Now it promotes an intellectual property treaty (TRIPS) that shores up corporate profits.

Large corporations assert exclusive ownership of what was common culture to which all had free and equal access. The feudal barons of the music business contest our traditional right to share songs. The Hollywood studios spread propaganda claiming that DVD rents are real property. Corporate privatization forces people who never knew they had a common culture to defend it. The US, with more weapons than the rest together, imposes global compliance to its legal fictions. The corporations’ antiquated methods of "command and control" browbeat governments and consumers into obedience. This “culture war” has only just begun and is universal. Classical slogans like “free markets” and “liberal democracy” were weapons in the war against feudalism. They now provide a fig leaf for corporate monopolists.

Living in society combines personal agency with its impersonal conditions. But the difference between them has collapsed. World society now resembles the Old Regime as a result. Copyright once protected the interests of individual authors. Music, movie and software corporations now invoke it to justify monopolistic rent extraction. Liberal democracy has become its antithesis. We must resist this new enclosure of the commons. An impersonal public sphere is indispensable to living in society. But individuality, moral purpose and religion no longer have any place in our common affairs. We must learn again how to separate personal and impersonal aspects of social life and life and then combine them anew.

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[1] Chapter 14 of Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022); see commentary at https://www.berose.fr/article2803.html. K. Hart, The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business personal and impersonal (2005).

[2] https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

[3] I organized a Yale seminar, “The transition from bronze to iron in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1600-500BC”.

[4] A petaFLOPS is a quadrillion (million billion) floating point operations per second.

[5] The American Anthropological Association has since made some moves towards open access.

[6] DeepL Translator from A.I. deep learning with individual user feedback.

[7] http://openanthcoop.net

[8] Luddism was a nineteenth-century movement resisting mechanization.

[9] Hart, Appendix 2003c.

[10] J. Breidenbach and A. Nyiri, Seeing Culture Everywhere (2009).

[11] FANGA: Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google and Amazon.

[12] C.B. Macpherson, Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions (1978)

[13] P. Drahos and J. Braithwaite, Information Feudalism (2002).

[14] T. Hartmann, Unequal Protection (2002).

[15] M. Hardt, Jefferson and democracy (2007).

[16] Hartmann (2002:147).

[17] D. Crowther and G. Aras, Corporate Social Responsibility (2008).

[18] L. Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property (1855)