The 1AC’s understanding of patents serves not only as a technique of commodification but is the capital used in the international network of information. The 1AC is zeroed by the technologies structured by the World Computer which uses patents as data to fuel the systems proliferation and the endless digitization ideas through the databases of digital networks that patent law relies on.

There are incongruous representations of patents circulating today, both in the medium of text and of a pictorial image.1 On the one hand, there is an increase in the popular aestheticization of patent drawings. A patent drawing decontextualizes and simplifies an abstract legal monopoly right into a pictorial representation of an inventio-n. But an isolated patent drawing removed from its original document context has no legal meaning or force in the sense of ascertaining, codifying or even understanding the contours of a patent as an intellectual property right. Patent drawings seem to be valued mainly for the aesthetic pleasure or familiar ‘novelty’ factor that they may generate (as seen in Fig. 3). On the other hand, in contrast to patent drawings’ popularity, efforts towards the full digitization of patent bureaucracy are continuing with networked distribution of patent documentation and examination practice (Kang 2019). Patent law drives and relies upon databases of digital documentation and networks. These have also engendered a tertiary service of information provision. These comprise private providers such as Clarivate, which merged  the leading private IP ‘intelligence’ services, such as Derwent and CompuMark, as well as the free, publicly available databases of the World Intellectual Property Organization, European Patent Office, or the US Patents and Trademark Office.2 Such an international network of digital patent ‘information’ is the possibly the largest legal networked bureaucratic information infrastructure, and it remains below the public radar. In contrast to public imagination of patent with geeky inventions depicted in technical drawings, the legal system is not particularly concerned with patent drawings. Its primary mode of representation of an invention is that of a text. The main genre of a patent’s representation is that of a document. The document in turn serves as a medium in the form of an identical file in the overall system of patents as data management (Kang 2012). Such a wide gap between the cultural representation of patents and their legal form remains underdiagnosed and underexplained. Analyzing IP’s effects on cultural significance and practices, Rosemary Coombe wrote her influential book, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law in the 1990s. The book’s analytical gaze was socio-legal by foregrounding the inquiry on law’s effect on society and culture, and not so much the other way around. The proliferation and adoption of patent drawings as cultural artifacts, however, indicates novel cultural imaginaries of patents, which shape the ways in which patent law is understood and legitimized. Furthermore, the realm of science, associated with patents in modern IP law’s subject matter division between arts and sciences, remained underexamined in Coombe’s treatment, perhaps because it was seen as being separate and/or extraneous to the cultural realm. The stipulated division between arts and sciences in modern intellectual property law runs along the legal divisions of copyright and patent laws. They conceal how sciences occupy a central role in contemporary cultural imaginaries of development and progress (Kim 2017). Sciences are not outside their cultural and social environments.3 University and industrial sciences, financial capitalism, and economic nationalism are closely intertwined with the privatization of sciences (Mirowski 2011). Close links between university technoscience, understood as interrelated scientific, business and cultural practices, and financial speculation underpin the Silicon Valley culture of venture capitalism and its adoption at a national(ist) scale by authorities through their ‘high tech’ and ‘start-up nation’ agendas (Daub 2020; see Stadler, Steuwer, Wulz 2021, for a historical contextualization of university policies and right-wing knowledge politics).4 In such a context of speculative, finance-driven capitalism, patent law has not only acted as techniques of commodification, but also of financial assetization: patents are not only used for raising capital, but also act as capital themselves (Kang 2015, 2020).