I've mentioned to a few people now that I'm changing directions in law school, but I haven't had time to adequately explain the decision to those who are interested. My rationale involves several different themes; by writing about it, I endeavor to explain it clearly (to myself as much as to you). The decision was the culmination of many ideas that had been swirling around my subconscious, and converged in a flash of insight while I was meditating at the compound (sincere thanks to ES and SJ).
The underlying premise of my decision is the realization that much of my sense of self-worth comes from my opposition to the dominant, materialist consumer culture that envelops every American (myself included) and would submit the entire world to its corporate fascism. I realized that I am, underneath it all, deeply counter-cultural, and that this is ultimately what drove me to the bay area. I took much for granted living in San Francisco, where the counterculture is dominant. Moving to the south bay and attending an affluent private university has starkly reminded me of the insidious pervasiveness of the seductive pseudo-culture of materialism, which, ironically, I moved thousands of miles across the country to escape. The experience only strengthens my resistance.
The next piece of the puzzle emerges from the nexus between the "information economy," intellectual property, and the consumer culture I rail against. In short, I've come to realize that consumerism is inextricably linked to society's misconceived notions of the "information economy," which is in turn built upon intellectual property rights that are becoming more of a hindrance to innovation and creation than an incentive.
The link between consumerism and the information economy is one that Cory Doctorow has elucidated recently in several articles and speeches, which I have blogged about here and there. Cory's theory is that our society, when it began thinking about the coming "information economy" made a gravely mistaken assumption that, like any tangible good, profit in this new era would be derived from selling information as a commodity. This was essentially a vestige of the pre-Internet era, when it was expensive and difficult to disseminate information. Yet in the Internet age, it becomes easier to create, copy, and disseminate information with each passing day. Thus there is a fundamental tension between technological development and the economic model we have adopted - a tension that begins to explain why, for example, the music industry has gone about destroying itself by attacking its own customers.
The link to consumerism comes in our pursuit of this poorly-conceived information economy. Our major international trade agreements, most prominently the GATT/WTO, require member countries to adopt Anglo-American style intellectual property regimes. In exchange for agreeing to protect American intellectual property - particularly television, movies, popular music, and computer software - we ceded the American manufacturing industry to our trading partners. In so doing, we opened the floodgates of cheap consumer goods that bury us today, and sold our soul to China. On the one hand, we've wagered our entire future on the entertainment and tech industries, while on the other our own technological progress continually undermines the very business model that protects them.
And it's all made possible by intellectual property. The truth of the matter, as I see it, is that intellectual property rights are beginning to hinder creativity and innovation. The value of the information economy comes not from the ability to restrict access to information (as IP rights seek to do), but from the ability to widely disseminate it. We hold back progress by erecting barriers to sharing information and collaborating to solve legitimate social problems. Instead of developing HIV vaccines, we churn out boner pills and hair growth medications, because there is vast profit to be made from marketing these fantasy drugs, and little profit, and thus little incentive, to be found in developing more socially-beneficial pharmaceuticals. The incentives that society once needed to innovate and create have become vast market distortions that today grant socially-questionable enterprises tremendous power and influence by way of state-sponsored economic dominion.
My conclusion is that intellectual property inescapably shores up consumer culture. Whether protecting the rights of a new startup, an independant artist, or an established mega-corporation, the underlying premise of intellecual property law is restricting access to information. This is antithetical to technological progress, to democracy, and to human culture. I used to think that becoming a legal advocate for IP reform would be a worthy cause, but a year and a half of law school has taught me that this is a social problem that the judiciary cannot solve. Liberalizing (or eliminating) intellectual property laws is a problem that only the legislature can resolve. Thus, my time as an advocate will be better expended elsewhere.
I came to law school to fight the man, not to make him richer. It's time to lay aside my fear of economic hardship and embrace my calling to help the individual taking on the Orwellian world we inhabit. It's time for me to follow my heart and soul, and pursue a career promoting my true values of social justice and the public interest. I bid a welcome farewell to the future of corporate schilling and material self-interest that I briefly contemplated in intellectual property law, and accept my calling to represent those who would challenge the status quo in pursuit of genuine human progress.
