Monopolising knowledge
We seem to be in a paradoxical situation. What we know is exploding and it is harder and harder for anyone to see the wood for the trees. Just at this point in time the idea of knowledge being a public good is under attack. More and more organisations try to control it either under the guise of commercial sensitivity or with the justification of seeking competitive advantage. We readily accept both these notions but in a cooperative paradigm they would not be tolerated so easily (if at all).
Knowledge can be monopolized and used to keep the status quo going.
- It has long been possible to use psychological knowledge to manipulate people more effectively.
- The much vaunted (and increasingly demonised) Big Data which is being used to drive advertising to new levels of sophistication has a number of down sides which are not just related to privacy and knowing what we signed up for. In the end the data is still self-selecting even though massive which means it will contain biases. By definition it ignores the poorer members of society who don’t access or use social media. However it is not just the poor who are ignored but also those who choose not to take part in the consumerist frenzy. It has also been observed that bias may be built into the algorithms that process the data, not least because the majority of these are likely to be men.
- Academic Journal publishers have practices that restrict access to research through paywalls regardless of the fact that taxpayers money may have funded the research
- Big Tech companies have practices that restrict use and slow down our computers - spyware (bad) is euphemistically called cookies (good). For a partisan rant about this as well as a robust defence of the public good case for the lost idealism of the free internet see Cory Doctrow, The Guardian 18 May 2010.
- There is an increasing trend of patent creep. Originally justified to provide a return on something that was risky and expensive originating in the c19th there are increasingly aggressive practices that attempts to monopolise knowledge for purely commercial purposes and in highly suspect ways, such as the patenting of molecules and simple processes that anyone could use like One-Click ordering.
For holistic political economy it is the way that knowledge is used that represents a change. We use knowledge now, a huge part of our culture is based on it but what we do not do (or do very well) is use what we know when it comes to political economy. In holistic political economy knowledge is use to shape and design the institutions of political economy themselves. It is used to increase the ease and likelihood of of cooperation emerging. This is a fundamental change, and to bring it about we need to bring integrative or systems thinking to the fore, see Systems Thinking - Implications