after total darkness: cultural darkness

i recently wrote an essay, cultural darkness, that was included in a book accompanying after total darkness, an exhibition that opened this past weekend at workspace2601 curated by adam katz and david godshall in collaboration with the object control project.

this is my first foray into academic writing in a while – the piece compares the degradation of the natural commons, light pollution in particular, to the degradation of our cultural commons, specifically the public domain. this seems particularly fitting in regards the recent celebration of public domain day. cultural darkness is released under a CC BY-SA license – you can order/download the full book as a PDF as well.

The natural commons and the cultural commons share far more than a semantic similarity – both, due to rapid advances in technology and lack of public awareness, have gone through immense turmoil and change over the past century. For the natural commons, this degradation is readily visible (albeit crystallized through the work of activists) in the air we breathe, the food we consume, the destruction of our greatest natural resources and the privatization of our few public spaces. The depletion of our cultural commons is less apparent – great art has not ceased to exist nor has academia failed to expand our collective knowledge. By and large, the intellectual and creative output of humankind has seemingly evolved, with each decade bringing new advances and aesthetic innovation. This is a deception, to say the least. Our collective knowledge and shared cultural resources – the public domain – have been crippled as a result of extended copyright terms. As we don’t always feel or observe these slight changes in our cultural ecosystem, society at large remains oblivious to this threat.

Light pollution, one of the lesser-discussed environmental ills, proves a salient foil for the depletion of our cultural commons – light and copyright proving analogous. Light pollution, put simply, eliminates darkness. While this may seem a benign complaint – humans and most all life forms thrive off sunlight – it is quickly understood to be deeply problematic. Light pollution changes the migration patterns of various birds, forces nocturnal animals such as bats to change habitats entirely, and confuses newborn mammals that are unable to differentiate between natural and man-made light. The term-creep of copyright law – which has arguably been extended six times in the past 30 years – acts similarly, forcing us to change the way we naturally interact with cultural works. This has become especially apparent in the past decade as copyright protections inhibit digital sharing and appropriation on a basic level.

To extend this analogy further, we can think of darkness as the public domain, “a range of abstract materials […] which are not owned or controlled by anyone.” A pure entity, the public domain is a source for all innovation to build upon, and lacks any type of legal restriction as to what can be done with the resources found therein. The richness of our public domain (specifically in the U.S.) has greatly decreased in the past 100 years, with many works published after 1923, and almost all published after 1977, subject to copyright claims of some sort. Just as light has polluted the darkness of night, so too have copyrighted works slowly encroached on this collective resource, weakening the public domain’s vibrancy over time.

It is important to remember that at its core, copyright is a legal mechanism meant to encourage creativity and growth, providing producers with an assurance that their works will remain protected. Like light, it is necessary for us to evolve, but it is also meant to exist in harmony with the public domain and the legal doctrine of fair use. Prior to the ubiquity of light-emitting objects (gas lamps, electrical lighting, LEDs, etc.), the darkness of night was rarely altered. London of the early 1800s, then the world’s most populated city at close to one million residents, was lit at night primarily by candles. Copyright, in its original inception, had a similar relationship to the public domain. They existed separately but harmoniously, serving different purposes towards a similar goal – to ensure innovation and efficiency. As copyright has grown more and more restrictive, the public domain has been shackled and diluted. Without a vibrant and continuously refreshed pool of knowledge we can all freely pull from, it seems logical that our cultural output will suffer in ways unquantifiable. Similarly, while copyright nourishes our creativity by providing protection, it has grown too pervasive and no longer allows for the counterbalance provided by a rich public domain that enables innovation.

The rise of sampling and remix culture as forms of vibrant creativity should provide particular concern in this regard. While the practice of appropriation is well documented throughout human history, contemporary methods have evolved at a rapid pace catalyzed by digital technologies. The means of cultural reuse provided by new technologies, while in sync with human tradition, conflict sharply with the law. A large percentage of material culture created today is illegal in some regard and copyright has forced some our most promising minds to skirt the law.

This cultural ailment, like light pollution, can be remedied through simple solutions. Free culture activists have been practicing a more balanced and moderate approach for decades, beginning with the open source software movement and evolving to encompass not only culture but more open methods of collaboration. Software licenses from the Free Software Foundation, open copyright licenses available through Creative Commons, and the growing use of online tools for collaboration such as wikis and blogs all point to a more sustainable cultural climate. Copyright and patents still remain the dominant institutions in this regard, but more individuals and groups are turning to free and open solutions every day.

There is a common assumption that light pollution affects only astronomers, and a similar assumption that copyright affects only content owners and pirates. This is obviously not the case. And while these issues are not directly observed on a day-to-day basis, they are degrading our shared commons at a rapid pace. Environmentalists, for their part, have done an exemplary job over the past two decades at making the ecological problems we face palpable, a task helped ironically by the mercurial temperament and apocalyptic manifestations of nature at large. Those in the free culture movement could work towards the same – articulating to a mainstream the need for as rich a cultural commons as we desire a natural commons. Until this is fully achieved the public domain, like darkness, will become increasingly a memory, a fabled past still in our collective conscious but no longer a true reality.

—
Further reading:

Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Networks
Jamie Boyle: The Public Domain
Lewis Hyde: The Gift
Lawrences Lessig: Free Culture
Siva Vaidhyanathan: Anarchist in the Library