be defined in terms of geographic districts, but can devolve to the subgroups of humanity most concerned with any issue. Thus it becomes possible to achieve what Bruce Tonn and David Feldman (1995*) called
There have been examples in the past when governmental jurisdictions overlapped to some degree, depending upon different functions that were performed. Voting districts, school districts, and postal delivery areas often fail to coincide. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created by the United States government in 1933 to serve energy needs and manage resources in an area covering portions of seven states. President Roosevelt conceptualized it as a new kind of organization, “a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise” [8]. However one may judge that particular experiment, which continues to the present day, it suggests that for certain purposes even old-fashioned forms of government could aggregate geographic areas in different ways for different purposes.
Today’s communication technology allows us to escape geographic boundaries altogether, for some public purposes. Just as fluid democracy seeks to assemble people into networks in which temporary opinion leaders may represent constantly fluctuating constituencies, the scope of decision-making and policy application may be geographically different for every topic, and at each historical moment. For some policy issues, quite different systems may coexist in a given area, but serving different constituencies.
A good hypothetical example is marriage laws. In secular societies, marriage is no longer a sacred institution bound by traditional customs, but a kind of contract, and there can be many different versions. Over the course of human history, a wide range of marital practices abounded. Whatever we may personally think of them, many ancient societies had strict rules of exogamy, forbidding marriage within culturally defined segments of society (Levi-Strauss 1969*), others permitted polygamy, and others differed greatly in the rules governing erotic behavior among young people (Malinowsky 1927*). Why should decisions about the legitimacy of different practices be decided by the particular latitude and longitude where the people live?
Given the liberalization of local laws relating to marriage, one could imagine multiple worldwide networks arising, each representing people who wished to follow a particular marital system. In most cases, the network would be of only modest importance in a family’s life, and for other purposes its members would be embedded in quite different networks, including one representing their geographic neighbors. The marriage network would develop the precise standards for the particular kind of marriage contract, might have as a minor adjunct an online dating service, and offer marital counseling and courts appropriate for its particular principles. It would judge cases of marital discord — except the most violent outbursts which might need to be handled locally — and define the remedies for most problems. Only people who had married within the system of a given network would participate in its political processes, but they could live anywhere on the planet.
It is possible that over time many institutions of society would become non-spatial, or at least allowing several alternative, specialized political networks to occupy the same territory. In major cities, there already exist multiple schools systems — secular, religious, public, private, charter — as well as home schooling in the United States for many families. Laws would need to be changed to permit public funding of religious schools, but each system could be funded only by its own constituency, so that nobody was required to pay taxes for a kind of education with which they did not approve. Multiple overlapping school systems would therefore have their own fluid democracy political systems, each designed to satisfy the particular needs of its constituency.
Whether we are really prepared to move toward non-spatial government, the worldwide digital communication network permits it. Marriages and schools may not even be the best examples of institutions ready to evolve beyond the limitations of local geography. Internet provides the world great freedom, along many dimensions of human action and experience, and we will need wisdom greater than any individual can possess, to know which directions to explore first.
The idea that government should regulate intellectual property through copyrights and patents is relatively recent in human history, and the precise details of what intellectual property is protected for how long vary across nations and occasionally change (Bainbridge 2003*). As a scientist, I am offended by the fact that scientists are accorded no legal rights with respect to their discoveries, which may have required intellectual genius and exhausting labor to achieve, whereas an engineer who tinkers up a new device can often patent it, and even rotten authors can copyright their scribblings. There are two standard sociological justifications for patents or copyrights: They reward creators for their labor, and they encourage greater creativity. Both of these are empirical claims that can be tested scientifically and could be false in some realms (Ganz-Brown 1998*; National Research Council 2000*).
Consider music (Bainbridge 2000*). Star performers existed before the 20th century, such as Franz Liszt and Niccolo Paganini, but mass media produced a celebrity system promoting a few stars whose music was not necessarily the best or most diverse. Copyright provides protection for distribution companies and for a few celebrities, thereby helping to support the industry as currently defined, but it may actually harm the majority of performers. This is comparable to Anatole France’s famous irony, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.” In theory, copyright covers the creations of celebrities and obscurities equally, but only major distribution companies have the resources to defend their property rights in court. In a sense, this is quite fair, because nobody wants to steal unpopular music, but by supporting the property rights of celebrities, copyright strengthens them as a class in contrast to anonymous musicians.
Government deregulation of music — ending copyright — could reduce the advantage of centralized music production over decentralized and diverse music. In a deregulated market, the Internet could help myriads of local and noncommercial musicians find audiences. Arguably, the communication technologies of the twentieth century commercialized culture, but now the Internet may decommercialize it by eroding the power of the distribution corporations.
Internet music file sharing has become a significant factor in the social lives of children, who download bootleg music tracks for their own use and to give as gifts to friends. Thus, on the level of families, ending copyright could be morally as well as economically advantageous. On a much higher level, however, the culture-exporting nations (notably the United States) could stand to lose, although we cannot really predict the net balance of costs and benefits in the absence of proper research. We do not presently have good cross-national data on file sharing or a well-developed theoretical framework to guide research on whether copyright protection supports cultural imperialism versus enhancing the positions of diverse cultures in the global marketplace.
It will not be easy to test such hypotheses, and extensive economic research has not conclusively answered the question of whether the patent system really promotes innovation. We will need many careful, sharp- focus studies of well-formed hypotheses in specific industries and sectors of life. For example, observational and interview research can uncover the factors that really promote cultural innovation among artists of various kinds and determine the actual consequences for children of Internet peer-to-peer file sharing. However, there seems to be little interest on the part of government research-funding agencies to look at politically sensitive issues like this, so while science will be a central part of our future revolution, it is not in a position to fire the first shots.
Quite apart from the economics of music, there are also many questions in the space between governance of creativity and music technology. A half century ago, a very different technology existed that had political implications, namely tape recorders, which I can describe from first-hand knowledge. I obtained my first tape recorder in 1958. This was actually two years
For several years, I used tape recorders to make personal copies of classical music from New York City FM radio stations, including many European avant-garde concerts that never appeared on commercial recordings. It never occurred to me I was violating anybody’s intellectual property rights. My third and fourth tape recorders were quarter-track stereo machines that could put two hours of high-fidelity monophonic music on a single cheap tape. The radio stations published their schedules well in advance, so it was both fun and easy to make these recordings. There was little incentive to make copies for friends, both because they had different musical tastes, and because copying was more tedious than the original recording, requiring two machines plus a fair amount of labor, and added noise to the recording. Today’s DVDs and online file sharing make copying easier, but also there has been a shift in who copies what kind of music for what purpose. Reel-to-reel tape recorders like the ones I had half a
