Alienability and rivalry are critical to the creation of exchange relations because they influence the degree to which a good is amenable to the process of, and the need for, exchange. Goods that cannot be alienated effectively become a single good for the purposes of exchange, if they can be exchanged at all. Rival goods are depleted by use, and hence must be obtained and replenished prior to any use, or they may substitute for one another, also affecting the need to obtain them through exchange. Thus, whether exchange takes the form of sale, gift, or grant, it is primarily alienable and rival goods that are the object of exchange. Or to put this in somewhat different terms, although human beings can exchange glances, insults, and affection, it is the exchange of alienable and rival goods such as a sack of grain, a team of oxen or a day’s work in the fields that constitute the paradigmatic form of the economic social relationship.
The degree to which alienable and rival goods precipitate social relations characterized by commercial exchange also depends on the ease with which the various uses of a good can be limited or controlled through access or possession. Exclusion cost is the outlay in time, trouble, and expenditure of resources that is required to prevent others from having access to a particular good or item of property. Like alienability, exclusion costs are in large measure a function of the material characteristics of the goods human beings utilize and on which they rely. Oxygen and vitamin D are alienable and rival goods, but it is fairly difficult to prevent people from having access to air and sunshine. It is, in contrast, fairly easy to keep jewels and trinkets where no one else can get them, hence the latter have more typically been understood as saleable items than the former. Items with very high exclusion cost are unlikely to be traded commercially.
Like alienability and rivalry, exclusion cost is amenable to situational variation. Situational change in exclusion cost has often taken the form of material manipulation of either the goods in question or of the circumstances in which they reside. Locks and fences are the classic technologies of exclusion, and a better lock will lower the cost of excluding others every time. It has also been possible to reduce exclusion costs through the development of informal institutions. Simply declaring that certain parties have an exclusive right to use a good will suffice in many cases. Queuing for service is among the most venerable of informal institutions in Western cultures, and everyone recognizes that the person at the front of the line has an exclusive right to be served next. If being served next is the good in question, we may thus say that for the first in the queue, the cost of excluding anyone else from this good is very low. By common consent, customary recognition of this right saves everyone a lot of time and trouble, making the cost of many daily transactions far more reasonable.
When customary rights of exclusion are threatened, it is always possible to bring in the coercive power of the state to back them up. The police represent a formidable way of lowering exclusion cost for all manner of private property. A person who would have to guard or defend an item of property can call on the police to do it, and the knowledge that arrest and prison are among the possible consequences of an unlawful taking raises the cost of theft, simultaneously lowering the cost of exclusion. Copyright and patent laws represent formal institutions that place the coercive power of the state behind a broad array of exclusive practices, even when no tangible property exists. The legal remedies of intellectual property law vastly reduce the cost of preventing others from using one’s intellectual creations through intimidation, bullying, spying, and other forms of self help.
Alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost represent features of the various items and entities in the world, including personal services and material things, that collectively determine which items and entities come to be the object of exchange relations, and which ones remain embedded within a more inchoate and presumptive context of social practice. It is very likely that anything alienable, rival, and excludable will be regarded as an item of personal or private property. It should not be surprising that when goods lack one or another of these three dimensions, people try make up for it either by passing laws or by changing the world in a material way. As institutional economists developed their analysis of these traits, they brought the economists’ bias that enabling transaction is always a good thing. They also brought the social scientist’s bias of focusing on social practice, and especially on formal institutions. As such, they have tended to focus on legal or policy reforms that will lower the costs of making an exchange. But as my illustrations demonstrate, it is as equally possible to affect alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost with a technical as with a legal change, and that change may or may not be a focus of design.
The material dimensions of alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost represent a “given” or natural infrastructure in which informal institutions evolve, either by chance or by design, and a set of background conditions against which formal institutions are formulated and enforced. When those background conditions change, by chance or by design, the entire significance of social institutions can be altered. All of which raises the question: if changes in the formal institutions of society are appropriate targets for political philosophies and theories of justice, why not also the technological transformation of alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost? This is, I take it, a somewhat more focused restatement of a question that has been asked many times before. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man suggests that the failure to subject technical systems to normative scrutiny is both a political and a philosophical failure. The political failure resides in the increasing power of capital and commercial interests to dominate all forms of discourse in industrial society, while the philosophical failure consists in positivist doctrines that created an epistemological space in which questions about technical efficiency were regarded as “value free,” (Marcuse, 1966)
For most people involved in the practice of design, Marcuse’s characterization of technology has seemed to be too metaphysical, too Heideggarian, and simply too vague to be of much use. Langdon Winner has had more success in calling for critical evaluation of technology and technical change by describing what he calls “the technological constitution of society.” This is a material and organizational infrastructure that predisposes a society toward particular forms of life and patterns of political response. Winner illustrates his idea with a number of examples, notably technological systems such as irrigation systems or electric power grids that dispose societies toward centrally administered, hierarchical relationships of political power (Winner, 1986). We should notice that what accounts for such tendencies is the way that these systems affect the alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost of the respective goods, water, and energy, that they produce and distribute.