Second part of a two-part lecture series on the crisis in copyright, given by Dylan Suzanne at the University of Maine, in November 2004. For further information, please visit http://www.dylansuzanne.info/mainelectures.html

Abstract:
Copyright is currently undergoing a crisis caused by the increasing availability and power of digital technologies. I argue that the reason for this change is inherent within the structure of technological progress.

Through the process of automation, the world is ordered in such a way that the human will can be outsourced to causal determinism. As automation becomes increasingly complete, it ceases to be alienating as is the case in assembly lines and becomes liberational as is the case with digital technologies. With this kind of radical automation comes a monadization of power: the weakest and least among those able to use radical automation can compete with even the strongest. We have seen this to be the case in digital technologies, where, for example, any user with internet access can now mass-produce and widely distribute their own software. We see this also in martial technology, where any group, no matter how small, can cripple or destroy nations through the increasingly available and diverse range of weapons of mass destruction.

I argue that these effects come from the same cause automation and the monadization of power and that our response should be similar in both cases: we must understand and work with technological progress in order to resist the regressive actions of those who seek to maintain the status quo, and in order to find new methods of action which can survive the current crisis and help those within the status quo to survive the crisis as well.

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