The Separation of (Economic) Power: A Cultural Environmental Perspective of Social Production and the Networked Public Sphere

Robert Lee Cunningham, The University of Western Australia

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Abstract

In the eighteenth century Montesquieu espoused the need to separate political power. In the twenty first century there is a pressing need to separate economic power. Drawing upon the frame of cultural environmentalism to counter the affects of the second enclosure movement related to Intellectual Property Rights, this paper advocates the employ of social production so as to diversify the production mix of the global information economy. This position is built upon public choice theory and the economic fundamentals of social production when contrasted with alternate production modes of production. Specifically, the paper submits that where the factors of information production include undeveloped ideas and unarticulated know-how, and where the allocation of human creativity and/or intellectual input are relied upon as the engines of innovation, social production may in some instances surpass the advantages of state-, firm- and market- based production. It is the information processing and allocation efficiency dimensions of social production that support comparative advantage perspectives. The level and development of critical hardware infrastructure related to a given technology, such as biotechnology or nanotechnology, is also an important aspect of the social production equation. The corollary of the central thesis within the paper is that social production in the information environment may afford, in some contexts, an important practical contribution to the contemporary liberal project of separating (economic) power.