The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America

3. Corporatization of the University: Rhetoric, Trends, Actuality

56 ▪ Chapter 2 its source code to allow continual collaboration and improvement of its product and therefore a more dynamic capture of the forms of cooperation that exceed its proprietary politics. analogously, in recent years the thriving field of genetic research in many industries is opting for open source solutions, which are considered to be more useful for the production and management of information, and therefore for profit. The internet is by this point taken as a model of knowledge production and the formation of collective intelligence—open and free, “in flagrant contradiction of the affirmation of the economy of private intellectual property.”61 The system of intellectual property takes on the features of one of the artificial barriers, creating scarcity precisely where there is abundance. The system is one of the many different borders that fence in, privatize, and enable the private appropriation of the common. it is certainly not the only one, since, as Carlo Formenti points out, the clash between “liberalizers” and “protectionists” on the issue of private property which characterized the conflict between the old and new economy in the 1990s just as it characterizes the conflict between firms from the first era of the digital revolution and Web 2.0 firms, is entirely played out around this conceptual axis, which creates a relation between the structurally “recombinant” vocation of digital technologies and business models founded upon personalized consumption. it is not by chance that Google, together with other colossuses of Web 2.0, is battling in order to limit intellectual property rights, demanding the right to draw freely from the universal catalogue of the works of human ingenuity and to turn these into the raw materials for remixing practices.62 Web 2.0 firms, led by the giant founded by larry page and sergey Brin, are in this way the symbol of a “capitalism without property” dreamed of by Benkler and other “anarco-liberals,” who see in the “economy of common goods” not an alternative to the free market but an extraordinary mechanism of valorization for a capitalism that is Coordinates of Capitalist Transition ▪ 57 no longer capable of governing social cooperation. “Capitalism without property” corresponds to a capitalism in which the appropriation of the product of the living labor—that is, the common—is realized even without intellectual property rights. moreover, wherever the processes of valorization and command are forced to recompose themselves continually downstream so as to capture the “the universal catalogue of the works of human ingenuity ,” the distinction between profit and rent begins to blur. in other words, basing itself on the appropriation of cooperation that in good measure is no longer organized by capitalism, profit takes on features that are strongly similar to those of rent, which different from its classical definition now commands labor. To this end peter drahos and John Braithwaite63 see the (unfinished) project of an economy of knowledge that functions through the rent produced thanks to the system of intellectual property as a form of “information feudalism.” let’s be clear: to speak of rent is not the same as to affirm the exclusively parasitic nature of capitalist capture. This, in turn, must be organized, frequently through processes of cooperation. Take, for example, the brand economy: the figure of the cool hunter represents an inversion of the classic forms of the production of value. if in the 1920s, Ford said of the model T, “buy any color you want as long as it’s black,” summing up the (in any case impossible) capitalist fantasy of being able to produce consumer needs upstream, the cool hunter operates downstream, to capture forms and styles of life and valorize them. This notwithstanding, the brand economy cannot be interpreted in purely parasitic terms, but in its own right functions through processes of cooperation, of which the brand hunter is but one segment, dedicated to the recomposition of command ex post. even open source is, in some respects, a space and an instrument for the rent-hunters of Web 2.0: in open source cooperation there is visible the co-presence of formal subsumption and real subsumption , which yet again casts doubt on the notion of their linear succession. What changes, therefore, is the temporality of capitalist appropriation. in this context, firms themselves must reorganize their productive structures, assuming the porous nature of the boundaries between firms themselves and “social production,” to use Benkler’s words.64 58 ▪ Chapter...