intellectual property

[This is a highly abridged version of an essay that can be found here: https://raddle.me/wiki/open_source_absolutists]

Open-source practices can be enormously valuable to anarchists. They facilitate cooperation, make technology more accessible and modifiable, and can undermine proprietary monopolies. But there is nothing inherently anarchist about the label “open source,” and treating openness as an absolute moral principle can obscure the relationships of power surrounding the labor that produces things.

Star Wars, Intellectual Property, and Cultural Expropriation
by Peter Gelderloos

To say I am a Star Wars fan would be an understatement. In high school, I could win the Star Wars Trivial Pursuit board game in one turn: I didn't get any answers wrong and kept going around the board until I had collected all the tokens (yeah, not many friends). Of course, as I got older, I realized that the Jungian archetypes, Daoist philosophy, and tale of rebellion against authority that had so enchanted me were mixed in with a democratic storyline of restoring a “rightful” government, along with plenty of racial stereotypes and settler tropes. Nonetheless, it is hard to disavow the fantasy worlds one grows up with. The total conversion of Star Wars into a “franchise” is occasion enough to comment on how we might respond when capitalism eviscerates an imaginary world we love. The kind of cultural resistance I want to explore also offers some tactics for dealing with problematic aspects of the original movies.