> Firstly Universities, notwithstanding their shortcomings, have a long history going back to millennia. Their importance in human history is unparalleled.
Capitalist academia is an essential part of empire. Although claimed as the opposite (“Die Luft der Freiheit weht”), capitalist academia often blocks the diffusion of innovation by commoditizing and monopolizing new advancements in science and technology, and working side by side with capitalist firms to help line up new intellectual laborers (members of the working class) to exploit.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.
Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide." [1]
What I'm saying is that we can have innovation, technology and science, without today’s capitalist Intellectual Property system, and without the gatekeeping of capitalist academia.
As Wendy described above, we have a capitalist government that enables a small amount of capitalist firms to violently exclude and deprive others when they are given a monopoly on a piece of knowledge. Through the ’great man theory’ and the ‘lone genius myth’ [2] these capitalist governments then also enable Silicon Valley capitalist firms (and their grandiose CEO’s) to take credit for any new advancements, despite all of the innovation actually being made possible by government subsidies and government-funded research [3 - Mariana Mazzucato has done a fantastic job highlighting how all the tech breakthroughs in the iPhone were made possible by taxpayer]. In other words: Silicon Valley mythology is making us pay for technology two times. The first time through tax by the capitalist state, and the second time we are paying through economic rents/taxes levied by the capitalist state on behalf of capitalist firms [4].
Both Lambda school and capitalist universities are a part of this larger issue: the violent gatekeeping of knowledge that disinherits and exploits the working class, over and over again.
I'm not at all trying to downplay the toxicity of selling off student debt to Venture Capital firms, as is done by Lambda school. That is seriously messed up.
I'm saying that to make a better society we need a new system for the digital age that de-commoditizes knowledge and gives each child equal access to the sum total of all human knowledge. We’ve let dogmatic ideas lead to a system that criminalizes curiosity. That criminalizes the act of asking questions. I want us to end this plunder of the commons right now.
Seriously, who do capitalists think they are, commoditizing knowledge like this? They are building a tiny sandcastle of privatized knowledge on a snowy mountain that is immeasurable inheritance left behind by our ancestors, not to mention that all of the actual work is being done by intellectual laborers who are part of the working class, and who are therefore not the owners of the this proprietary technology themselves, and who are only paid a wage (while being kept docile by ‘company perks’).
By and large the general public still believes in our patent system due to a further set of myths. They are told IP laws are justified because they give inventors time to commercialize.
If only this were still true. It isn’t. And it hasn't been for the last few decades. Capitalist firms now predominantly use trade secret laws to commoditize and monopolize knowledge:
“Patents are typically viewed as a cornerstone of intellectual property licensing. The licensing landscape, however, has been changing. In recent years, trade secrets have become “the crown jewels of corporations” and “workhorse[s] of technology transfer.” Recent court decisions on trade secret misappropriation exhibit damage awards that are in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, indicating how valuable trade secrets are to companies.
Trade secrets cover 90% of all new technology; “over 80% of all license and technology transfer agreements cover proprietary know-how (trade secrets) or are hybrid agreements covering both patents and trade secrets.” Therefore, it is virtually impossible to license a patent without also transferring applicable proprietary knowledge and information. As there is always more to every invention, and certain information inevitably escapes a patent application, some commentators asserted that “a patent [is a] little more than an advertisement for the sale of accompanying know-how.”” [5]
This an example of Tesla and their purchase of the trade secrets of Maxwell Technologies’ dry electrode batteries:
“In 2014, Elon Musk made Tesla’s patents available for anyone to use for free, stating that “technology leadership is not defined by patents.
But do patents stifle progress, and will releasing patents really have this result?
[…] Patents are a trade with a government. The inventor agrees to disclose the invention to the public in exchange for a limited exclusive right to the invention. […] It is exceedingly rare that an inventor comes up with something completely new. Virtually all inventions are the result of combining existing elements and adding something new.
[…] Tesla recently acquired battery manufacturer Maxwell Technologies’ company for $218 million to learn its trade secrets for dry electrode batteries. Obviously, Musk values trade secrets, and he must believe that they do not stifle progress, or he would have released them to the public as well. However, trade secrets do not promote the progress of innovation. Trade secrets stifle progress. […] [W]hen an invention could be patented, keeping it as a trade secret denies the public knowledge of how the invention works, which in turn denies the public the ability to improve, combine, or invent around the invention.
[...] Trade secrets have become the preferred invention protection choice of many tech multinationals. […] Hiding inventions as trade secrets acts to protect these huge multinational corporations […]. This is the reason that huge multinationals lobby so hard for strong trade secret laws and weak patent laws. This is clearly shown in Musk’s low valuation of his patents and high valuation of trade secrets.
Trade secret protection for inventions that could otherwise be patented is bad public policy because it stifles the progress of innovation and it consolidates money, markets and power into a few huge corporations […]” [6]
[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...
[3] https://nintil.com/mazzucato-and-the-iphone-i/
[4] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
[5] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2334060
[6] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...