IPR appropriates indigenous cultures and knowledges – our method of fugitive hacking and redistribution of software solves the link

A not insignificant part of the relations within the digital realm could be referred to as gift economies. The Digital will be dealt with in greater length below, but for now, it should suffice to point out that they also become a target of primitive accumulation (Fuchs, 2012, p. 707). “Unpaid labour extends to different realms, such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Baidu, LinkedIn, knowledge creation and reproduction”; of course, this also affects labour activities involving domestic, educational, care, etc., “so that the human being in contemporary capitalism spends a lot of working hours every day in creating value for capital by abstract labour that is unpaid” (Fuchs, 2012, p. 716). Some of them are directly involved in the process of value creation, while others are merely indirectly involved by providing elements of social infrastructure. Everything that might have appeared to represent a barrier, an impossibility for private appropriation, is now being reconfigured within a new landscape of apparently endless possibilities. “The pressing search for new fields of expansion and acquisition finds an indispensable ally in technoscience” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 54). With historical reduction of the value of knowledge, access to it and consequently a form of general appropriation become ubiquitous. However, information and knowledge can always have a direct impact on real economic and political-economic power relations. The free exchange of knowledge through these gift economies and general appropriation must be blocked if contemporary capitalist power is to maintain its status quo. “Rivalry, as a consequence, has to be constructed”, a qualitative change which the authors call “ontological commodification” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 55f). Even the United Nations promotes this logic of commodification, as everything becomes subject to the logic of profit. Knowledge and cultures emerging in specific places become excluded from intellectual property(common) (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 59). On the other hand, capital makes no real distinction of use-values. It appropriates for free all cultural practices and developed knowledge which may assist in fostering, producing, and appropriating surplus-value. An example is the so-called sharing economy, which despite its propagandistic excitement focusing on the term “sharing”, analogous to the Creative Commons, is simply another mechanism to penetrate the dimensions of social life not yet subordinated by the logic of economic imposition with an economic dependency prompted by the logic of primitive accumulation (Mazzucato, 2018). Gift economies are, therefore, subsumed under capitalism; now, only the appearance of gift economies is maintained, while in practice, it attains the essence of capitalist economic/market imperatives.

Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum denounce that there is more than meets the eyes when the phenomenon of knowledge-based economy (KBE) is considered. “A shadowy side of the KBE is the primitive accumulation of capital (in the form of intellectual property) through private expropriation (or enclosure) of the collectively produced knowledge of past generations” (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 287). Knowledge is transmuted from a collective into a private resource, namely, intellectual property(private). As briefly summarised in Chap. 4 (especially when analysing biopiracy), first, there is the appropriation of indigenous, aboriginal, and foreign knowledge and culture; this process occurs outside of the so-called free market and represents the immediate expropriation and conversion into “commodified knowledge”. Second, the appropriation of nature represents a new domain of colonisation. Third, the effect of the so-called second enclosure is similar to the first in that it separates labour from the means of labour, “thereby appropriating the knowledge of the collective labourer”. Fourth, knowledge is further subsumed to a new form of management imposed top-down by elements such as the Bayh-Dole Act or TRIPS. Finally, intellectual property(private) is so drastically extended that it provokes the “erosion of any residual public interest” (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 287). Rebecca Eisenberg refers to the cul-de-sac: “Even if exclusive rights enhance private incentives to develop further research tools, they could do considerable damage to the research enterprise by inhibiting the effective utilisation of existing ones” (Eisenberg, 1994, p. 647). This process of primitive accumulation through “the major expansion of patents into what used to be the realm of science is”, according to Richard Nelson, “well documented” (Nelson, 2003, p. 1702). This progression of major control and “regulation” is contrasted with previous phases of humanity in which “law” was concerned with particular cultural events that might have “disturbed the peace” but not with cultural “creation or spread” (Lessig, 2004, p. 8).