Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harker KB | Judge: Ari Davidson
The Aff’s portrayal of a world with reduced IP protections as an “information commons” where inequality is solved by deregulation perpetuates the neoliberal myth of increased competition ensuring a perfect market
Kapczynski 14 (Amy, a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and Faculty Co-Director of the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog. Her areas of research include information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health.) “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’S LEVIATHAN” Duke Law, Law and Contemporary problems, 2014. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4710andcontext=lcp BC
Over the last decade or so, a powerful set of critiques has emerged to contest the dominant account just sketched out as well as the contemporary state of IP law.12 These arguments have come from many directions, some even arising from scholars who previously were champions of the dominant account.13 The most prominent and potent line of theoretical critique in the legal literature has come in the guise of arguments for free culture and the “information commons” and has been most influentially articulated by Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.14 Both have stressed the problems with expansive exclusive rights regimes in information and have also sketched a set of actually existing alternatives to market-based exclusionary forms of information and cultural production. Lessig has written a series of influential books that have made him a “rock star of the information age,”15 particularly for young Internet and free-culture activists. He has argued powerfully, for example, that existing copyright law is in deep conflict with the radical new possibilities for creativity in the digital age. As he points out, when a mother posting a video of her toddler dancing to a Prince song on YouTube is threatened with a $150,000 fine for copyright infringement, something has gone seriously awry.16 Lessig also contends that copyright law today is too long, too expansive, and instantiates a “permission culture” that is antithetical to free expression in the age of the remix.17 As he puts it, “the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries,” creating the possibility of markets that “include a much wider and more diverse range of creators,” if not stifled by incumbents who use IP law to “protect themselves against this competition.”18 Benkler’s work has also been extraordinarily formative in the field, particularly for his insights into the multiplicity of modes of information production. As he has stressed, the conventional justification for IP does not account for the many successful and longstanding modes of market nonexclusionary information production.19 For example, attorneys write articles to attract clients, software developers sell services customizing free and opensource software for individual clients, and bands give music away for free to increase revenues from touring or merchandise.20 More pathbreaking still is Benkler’s account of the importance of “commons-based peer production,” a form of socially motivated and cooperative production exemplified by the volunteer network that maintains Wikipedia or the groups of coders who create open-source software products such as the Linux operating system.21 In the digital networked age, as Benkler describes, the tools of information production are very broadly distributed, “creating new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture.”22 These changes have increased the relative role in our information economy of nonproprietary production and facilitate “new forms of production that are based neither in the state nor in the market.”23 Because commons-based peer production is not hierarchically organized and is motivated by social dynamics and concerns, it also offers new possibilities for human development, human freedom, a more critical approach to culture, and more democratic forms of political participation.24 This line of critique has been profoundly generative and has helped launch an important new conceptualization of the commons as a paradigm. That paradigm, as a recent book puts it, “helps us ‘get outside’ of the dominant discourse of the market economy and helps us represent different, more wholesome ways of being.”25 Proponents of the commons concept draw upon contemporary articulations of successful commons-based resource management by Elinor Ostrom and her followers.26 They do mobilize retellings of the political and economic history of the commons in land in Europe before enclosure,27 and recent evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that suggests that humans have deep tendencies toward cooperation and reciprocation.28 They argue that A key revelation of the commons way of thinking is that we humans are not in fact isolated, atomistic individuals. We are not amoebas with no human agency except hedonistic “utility preferences” expressed in the marketplace. No: We are commoners—creative, distinctive individuals inscribed within larger wholes. We may have unattractive human traits fueled by individual fears and ego, but we are also creatures entirely capable of self-organization and cooperation; with a concern for fairness and social justice; and willing to make sacrifices for the larger good and future generations.29 This stands, of course, as a powerful rebuke to the neoliberal imaginary, which “constructs and interpellates individuals as . . . rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’— the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions.”30 III Given this radical—and, in my view, critically important—attempt to rethink the subject at the core of neoliberal accounts, it is all the more striking that proponents of the commons often appear to adopt a neoliberal image of the state. For example, the introduction to a recently edited volume that gathers writings on the commons from seventy-three authors in thirty countries (entitled, tellingly, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State) has this to say: The presumption that the state can and will intervene to represent the interests of citizens is no longer credible. Unable to govern for the long term, captured by commercial interests and hobbled by stodgy bureaucratic structures in an age of nimble electronic networks, the state is arguably incapable of meeting the needs of citizens as a whole.31 The commons, they suggest, is a concept that seeks not only to liberate us from predatory and dysfunctional markets, but also from predatory and dysfunctional states. Something immediately seems incongruous here. If people are inherently cooperative reciprocators, why are states irredeemably corrupt? After all, as Harold Demsetz famously wrote in his 1967 attack on Arrow’s optimism about state production of information, “government is a group of people.”32 Lessig, one of the progenitors of the language of the commons in the informational domain, often leads with a similar view of the state: If the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering. Markets work better than Tammany Hall in deciding who should get what, when. Or as Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase put it, whatever problems there are with the market, the problems with government are more profound.33 Lessig reveals his own sense of the power of this conception of the state when he seeks to tar IP law with the same brush; we should rebel against current IP law, he suggests, because we should “limit the government’s role in choosing the future of creativity.”34 Benkler is more measured but admits as well to viewing the state as “a relatively suspect actor.”35 We should worry, he suggests, that direct governmental intervention “leads to centralization in the hands of government agencies and powerful political lobbies,”36 a view that echoes the neoliberal account described above. It should perhaps not surprise us that leading critics of neoliberal information policy embrace a neoliberal conception of the state. After all, neoliberalism is not merely an ideology, but also a set of policy prescriptions that may have helped to call forth the state that it has described. As David Harvey puts it, “the neoliberal fear that special-interest groups would pervert and subvert the state is nowhere better realized than in Washington, where armies of corporate lobbyists . . . effectively dictate legislation to match their special interests.”37 There are, it must be said, few areas of law that better exemplify this problem than IP law. For example, Jessica Litman has documented the astonishing process through which the 1976 Copyright Act was drafted, in which Congress delegated most of the drafting to interest groups that were forced to negotiate with one another.38 Other scholars have offered similarly startling accounts of the genesis of the most important IP treaty today, the TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. TRIPS came into force in 1996, revolutionizing international IP law by both imposing new standards and by rendering them enforceable through the WTO’s disputeresolution system, which authorizes trade retaliation to enforce its judgments. Most countries in the world are members of TRIPS, and the Agreement introduced, for developing countries in particular, substantial new obligations, such as the obligation to grant patents on medicines and food-related inventions. Several excellent histories of the treaty have been written, documenting its beginnings as a brash idea proposed by “twelve chief executive officers (representing pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries).”39 As Susan Sell has described, the TRIPS Agreement was a triumph of industry organizing. Through TRIPS, Industry revealed its power to identify and define a trade problem, devise a solution, and reduce it to a concrete proposal that could be sold to governments. These private sector actors succeeded in getting most of what they wanted from a global IP agreement, which now has the status of public international law.
Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence.
Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT
There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems.
The alt is to reject the aff in favor of a critique that cultivates educated hope - evaluate the aff and alt on the level of ideological commitments – these policies won’t happen which takes out consequentialism good offense – BUT until we unlearn the assumption that getting government out of the way will let markets flourish and solve all our problems, we'll never be able to engage in robust, communitarian policymaking that truly centers human need and our obligations to others. Wilson 17:
Julie A. Wilson {Julie A. Wilson is Associate Professor, Allegheny College, Department of Communication Arts and Theatre. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Critical Media Studies and a M.A. in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. Her B.A. came from Macalester College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa}, 17 - ("Neoliberalism (Key Ideas in Media andamp; Cultural Studies): 9781138654631: Media Studies Books @ Amazon.com," Routledge, 7-19-2017, https://books.google.com/books?id=5pouDwAAQBAJandpg=PT29andlpg=PT29anddq=22unlearn+neoliberalism22andsource=blandots=vIhe_sQ1Wkandsig=ACfU3U0i7yO8ittjco_PDzZGO7rxU89CYAandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwiN4631n_ryAhUdCTQIHWLNAzcQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepageandqandf=false)//marlborough-wr/
New Stories for New Worlds As we will see in our mapping of the neoliberal conjuncture, competition's totalizing yet tenuous power over our everyday lives is rooted in what Keating calls “status quo stories”—those stories that get told in popular culture, and that we often tell ourselves, which cement our relationship to our present conjuncture and our investment in the world as we currently know it. She explains: Generally spoken with great certainty, these and similar comments (commands, really) reflect unthinking affirmation of the existing reality and a stubborn, equally unthinking resistance to change. Because we believe that our status-quo stories represent accurate factual statements about ourselves, other people, and the world, we view them as permanent, unchanging facts. This belief in the status-quo's permanence becomes self-fulfilling: We do not try to make change because change is impossible to make. “It's always been that way,” we tell ourselves, “so why waste our energy trying to change things?” “People are just like that-it's human nature, so plan accordingly and alter your expectations! There's no point in trying to change human nature!" Status-quo stories trap us in our current circumstances and conditions; they limit our imaginations because they prevent us from envisioning alternate possibilities.10 Status-quo stories double down on reality, making it seem like those socially constructed forces impinging on us are natural rather than historical, political, and subject to change. “Status-quo stories have a numbing effect,” Keating writes. “When we organize our lives around such stories or in other ways use them as ethical roadmaps or guides, they prevent us from extending our imaginations and exploring additional possibilities."11 One of my students aptly described neoliberal culture as a “status-quo storytelling machine.” To keep us living in competition, neoliberalism generates a host of status-quo stories about the naturalness and inevitability of self-enclosed individualism. Indeed, we might say that self-enclosed individualism operates as the foundational status quo story of neoliberal culture, where competition has become synonymous with all of life. Self-enclosed individualism keeps us not only divided from one another, but also actively pitted against each other. We are stuck in an oppositional consciousness that refuses to acknowledge our social interconnections, even though, as our shared anxieties suggest, we've never had more in common than right now! No matter where we are or what we're doing, neoliberal culture encourages us to see each other through a competitive lens that makes the transformation of our social world, and ourselves, impossible. We become incapable of acknowledging how our fortunes and fates are entwined with those of others who are living very different realities. We become callous and hardened to the suffering of others. We see suffering and death everywhere, and while this might register as bad or wrong or upsetting, we nonetheless stay stuck within the horizons of our own self-enclosed bubbles. The devastating powers of status-quo stories are clear in so many of the conversations we have on college campuses about power, privilege, and difference. In fact, I started teaching courses on neoliberal culture to help my students understand the broader histories and contexts that were impinging on these conversations and making them so fraught, and ultimately so unproductive. Time and time again, in open community forums and classroom discussions of systemic inequalities, I watched students voice painful personal experiences only to get nowhere. Indeed, when asked to consider various forms of privilege, many of my white, male students get defensive. The idea that they haven't earned their place through their own decisions and hard work, but rather benefited from inherited wealth and opportunity, means that they are not good people from the perspective of neoliberalism. Talking about issues of privilege threatens to diminish their sense of self and individual value, so they recoil from conversations that ask them to see their place within broader legacies of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Accordingly, they hold on tight to status-quo stories of self-enclosed individualism to protect themselves, doubling down on their privilege to secure their status in a competitive world. However, it is important to see that status-quo stories of self- enclosed individualism also inform my students from historically oppressed and marginalized groups. These students suffer daily: they live in an environment that professes to celebrate “diversity,” while, in the context of their own lives, they are reminded again and again just how much they don't belong or matter. Not surprisingly, they demand “safe spaces” and protection for themselves and their peers, and they often draw hard lines between allies and enemies. Here too though, we see neoliberal stories at work. What matters for my students, and rightly so, is the way that “microaggressions”—those daily, mundane experiences of discrimination that accumulate over time-diminish their own capacities for flourishing as self-enclosed individuals. My point here is not to suggest that privileged students and marginalized students are the same because they are both invested in a version of self-enclosed individualism. Rather, my point is they share a situation; despite their different and unequal social positions, they have similar feelings-of defensiveness and a fear of failure—and status-quo stories in common. These commonalities do not imply evenness or equality, but rather interconnection, that is, a shared conjuncture. It is the recognition of this conjunctural interconnection that can thread our lives together and open up possibilities for more egalitarian futures. However, living in competition and the oppositional consciousness it demands obscure these commonalities and the interconnections that could bring students into new relations with one another. As a result, we stay caught up in the world as we know it. We stay stuck in competition, even though we all are yearning for different worlds. We desperately need new stories, stories that offer us different pathways to each other. As Keating puts it, we need stories that help us move from “me” to “we” consciousness.12 However, this book is not going to write these new stories for you. Rather, the goal of this book is to provide you with the resources for writing these new stories in and through your own lives. The Work of Critique Ultimately, writing new stories will require a new sense of yourself and your world, as well as what is possible, and realizing this new sense will require, first and foremost, cultivating a deeply critical orientation toward the world as we currently know and experience it. This critical orientation dislodges the sense of inevitability of neoliberalism, self-enclosed individualism, and living in competition; it knows that things don't have to be this way and, thus, senses the possibilities for resistance and transformation that are everywhere. It is so crucial to understand that this critical orientation is not simply about saying that aspects of neoliberal culture are “bad” or "wrong.” Rather, the work of critique is about seeing the flows of power and ways of thinking that make the neoliberal conjuncture possible and hold it together. Critique is therefore a mode of knowing—a form of everyday intellectual work—that is aimed at exposing the myriad workings of power and its status-quo stories. As Michel Foucault explains, “A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.”13 To clarify Foucault's idea, let's think back to the student discussions of power and privilege discussed above. The work of critique is not simply about pointing out privilege, although this is, of course, vital work. The work of critique goes beyond pointing out what's wrong and seeks to unravel the socially constructed conjuncture in which these problems emerge and get negotiated. For only then can we step outside of the competitive, oppositional consciousness of neoliberal culture and begin to imagine a radically different future built on equality and shared security. This work of dislodging the inevitability of our conjuncture and its status-quo stories is hard but vital intellectual work that requires not only critique of our social world, but also transformation of ourselves. Indeed, truly critical work is always profoundly disruptive of our own identities and knowledges. This work can be immensely painful, as it strips away the certainty and comfort provided by status-quo stories. This work can also be, and should be, immensely joyful and life-giving, as it enables us to free ourselves from the status-quo stories and devastating limitations they put on our lives, imaginations, and social relationships. This mix of pain and joy at the heart of critical work comes from the way that critique asks us to “lose confidence” in our world. As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes, Losing confidence: it can be a feeling of something gradually going away from you, being eroded. You sense the erosion. You might stumble, hesitate, falter; things might gradually unravel so you end up holding onto the barest of threads. It might be an experience in the present that throws things up, throws you off balance.... When you lose confidence it can feel like you are losing yourself: like you have gone into hiding from yourself.4 Losing confidence in your world is thus a form of existential crisis —you are disoriented; your world is shattered. At the same time, losing confidence in status-quo stories means gaining confidence for resistance and transformation. We become bolder, less anxious, more optimistic, capable of social interconnection, political intervention, and acting on and from a place of commonality. This is real freedom. Critique is ultimately about unlearning our world so that we might reconstruct it anew. Losing confidence in neoliberal culture means being able to say no to it in the conduct of our daily lives. In these capacities for resistance, we gain confidence that another world might actually be better, worth opening ourselves up to, worth fighting for. We begin to cultivate what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated hope is not “a romanticized and empty” version of hope; rather, it is a form of hope enabled by critique that “taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.” With educated hope, our sense of who we are and of what might be possible shifts in profound ways. This is when those new worlds we are longing for open up. What’s to Come Each of the chapters that follow offer a variety of intellectual tools for mapping the neoliberal conjuncture. Taken together, they are designed to produce a holistic and thick understanding of neoliberalism and its myriad powers to shape our identities, sensibilities, social worlds, and political horizons. Having a thick understanding of neoliberalism means that you feel in your bones that there is nothing natural or inevitable about neoliberalism and its status-quo stories. It means that you understand that neoliberalism is the outcome of a range of contingent historical processes that have consequences across social, political, economic, and cultural fields. In other words, by the end of our journey, you'll know how our neoliberal conjuncture has been, and continues to be, constructed. You'll also, therefore, be able to sense the other worlds on the horizon that are just waiting to be constructed, so long as, together, we can develop the resources, capacities, and stories of interconnection for bringing them into being. More specifically, the book is divided into two sections. The first section, titled “Critical Foundations,” focuses on cultivating a broad, critical orientation toward neoliberal culture. The first chapter charts the rise of neoliberal hegemony through four historical phases. The goal is to illustrate exactly how competition came to be the driving cultural force in our everyday lives. As we will see, there is nothing natural or inevitable about neoliberalism. It was a political and class-based project to remake capitalism and liberal democracy that was conceived, organized for, and eventually won. In the second chapter, we delve into the world of neoliberal theory and its critical consequences. Here we'll explore exactly what neoliberal thinkers believe about the state, markets, and human actors, and what distinguishes neoliberalism from earlier schools of liberal thought. We'll also interrogate what I call the four Ds—disposability, dispossession, disimagination, and de- democratization—which, taken together, enable us to clearly see and articulate what is so devastating about the rise of neoliberalism. The third chapter examines the cultural powers specific to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism advances through culture, specifically through the promotion of an enterprise culture that works to impose competition as a norm across all arenas of social life. In order to see and specify how neoliberalism works through culture, we take contemporary education as a case study and unpack the entangled cultural powers of neoliberal governmentality, affect, and ideology. The second section is titled “Neoliberal Culture.” In these chapters, we explore the worlds of neoliberal labor, affect, and politics respectively, tracing what happens when our everyday lives as workers, individuals, and citizens become organized around living in competition. The fourth chapter examines how neoliberalism turns everyday life into a “hustle,” where all the contexts of daily life become animated by the demands of neoliberal labor. At stake here are the ways in which we are all hustling to get by, yet we stay radically divided from one another along lines of gender, race, and class thanks to the norm of self- enterprise. The next chapter hones in on what it feels like to inhabit enterprise culture by exploring neoliberal affect and the care of the self. As we already know, living in competition breeds widespread anxiety, not to mention depression and illness, making self-care an ongoing, pressing problem of everyday life. While neoliberal culture offers us plenty of tools for self-care that ultimately keep us stuck in our self-enclosed individualism, this chapter also considers how self-care might be a site for resistance and political intervention. The final chapter focuses on neoliberal politics, tracing what happens to citizenship and social action in our contemporary conjuncture. As we'll see, neoliberalism privatizes our political horizons by remaking democracy into a market competition for visibility and equality. Throughout this mapping of the neoliberal conjuncture, we will engage in a mode of critical work that will, hopefully, enable you to unlearn neoliberalism and thus begin to write new stories about our conjuncture—including both our commonalities and differences—and the alternative worlds we are yearning for. Indeed, our critical work will only matter to the extent that it opens up our individual and collective horizons to a future beyond living in competition.