Your describing texts as a 'gift' draws some parallels to one of McKenzie Wark's essays on technics (Information Wants to Be Free, But...). And while she discusses the tension between the workings of the culture industry, investors and intermediaries reducing everything to a commodity, and actual culture being a 'world of gift giving' — a culture of sharing 'outside the commodity economy and outside the law' — the scope of her essay doesn't quite cover the idea of culture evolving to have 'ownership-value' in and of itself.
Regardless, I thought that her concluding ideas were in the same vein as your utopian thinking, and might be relevant: "Those of us who have been keeping up with the whole line of thought about things having "agency" might dispute that [information doesn't want to be free, people do]. Once information started to be produced as something relatively autonomous from the material substrate that sustained it, it really did seem to want to be shared like a gift. As I put it in a different riff on the same meme: information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. It keeps getting stuffed back into the narrow confines of rather old-fashioned models of absolute private property."
Your describing texts as a 'gift' draws some parallels to one of McKenzie Wark's essays on technics (Information Wants to Be Free, But...). And while she discusses the tension between the workings of the culture industry, investors and intermediaries reducing everything to a commodity, and actual culture being a 'world of gift giving' — a culture of sharing 'outside the commodity economy and outside the law' — the scope of her essay doesn't quite cover the idea of culture evolving to have 'ownership-value' in and of itself.
Regardless, I thought that her concluding ideas were in the same vein as your utopian thinking, and might be relevant: "Those of us who have been keeping up with the whole line of thought about things having "agency" might dispute that [information doesn't want to be free, people do]. Once information started to be produced as something relatively autonomous from the material substrate that sustained it, it really did seem to want to be shared like a gift. As I put it in a different riff on the same meme: information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. It keeps getting stuffed back into the narrow confines of rather old-fashioned models of absolute private property."
Riveting work as always!
that's good... I wish I wanted to read Wark — I just... can't stand how she writes.😵💫
and thank you!