The ubiquity of scarcity

Abstract

To pre-contact Aboriginal Australians, possessions were unwelcome. When you are nomadic, possessions are a burden. Rather than each member of a group having their own spear, it makes more sense that someone who wants to hunt kangaroos on a given day picks up a colleague’s spear without asking and returns it when they are done. But with Europeans came property laws and a gradual displacement of the sharing ethos (Belk et al., 2000). Still, the European laws at the time dealt with tangible or “real” property. When it came to creative art, there was another sort of encounter with Western property rights, in this case intellectual property. When Aboriginal Australian art began to become popular on the world market, it was still common to have an artwork painted on sand by multiple members of a clan who were responsible for a clan design (Belk & Groves, 1999). But the Western art market demanded individual artist signatures as well as more permanent canvases. This became a bit challenging. Heraclites declared to Westerners two and a half millennia earlier that water, air, fire, and human intellect are a part of a commons available to all (Hyde, 2010, p.15). Opposing this principle became trickier still when the internet was developed, and free thinkers of the day declared that “information wants to be free.” Soon collective movements like Napster and Pirate Bay became hubs on which to freely share and acquire, recorded music, movies, and software (Giesler, 2006). Corporate battles ensued and contemporary sharers were branded as pirates and faced with fines and imprisonment.