Centrally administered irrigation systems in the ancient world and contemporary electric power grids succeed in part because they represent technical solutions to real problems, but they also have the effect of converting goods that are comparatively non-rival with high exclusion costs, into goods that are just the opposite. Water and energy are virtually everywhere in most locales, though frequently not in large enough concentrations to accomplish certain critical tasks such as agriculture or manufacturing. In their natural state, water and energy have high exclusion costs; it takes a bit of trouble to keep people from having access to them. Natural water systems such as rivers and springs also serve a number of purposes simultaneously and in this sense are comparatively non-rival goods. Though generally depleted in use and in that sense naturally rival, energy in the form of wood and mineral fuels or localized wind and water mills is relatively specialized in the types of work it can be expected to perform. One type yields heat and the other mechanical power, and further technology is needed to reconfigure them for other purposes. Thus water and energy are relatively non-rival under these configurations of the material world. The irrigation system and the power grid reduce exclusion cost as they increase rivalry, and the result is goods that are far more amenable to centralized control and to commodity exchange than water and energy are without these technological infrastructures. What is more, both systems provide a way to alienate their respective goods from a local setting, much as wagons and roads transform the alienability of grain. Thus, alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost are part and parcel of what Winner has called the technological constitution of society. These traits specify the politically important design parameters of a technological system more clearly.
However, if the conceptual framework made available by institutional analysis allows us to sharpen the questions we wish to direct at technology, it also results in a deflation of the thesis that technology needs to be questioned. First it is clearly specific tools and techniques as utilized in specific situations that give rise to the material consequences I have been illustrating, not “technology” as a metaphysical force. Second, not all of these material changes will rise to the level of political importance. One would hardly object to better locks on the ground that they lower the exclusion costs for people who use them. That is what locks are supposed to do. Third, Marcuse’s belief that there is a dominant logic or trajectory of technology is weakened, rather than strengthened, by the institutional analysis. Technological change has the potential to affect alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost in myriad ways. Xerox copiers, computers, and the Internet have raised the exclusion cost for goods such as texts, audio recordings, and images, at the same time they have made them less rival. As a result, these items are less easy to control and less like commodity goods. Not surprisingly, those who benefited from the old material structure have moved quickly to encourage the enactment of formal legislation that would restore some the rivalry and lower the costs they incur in excluding what they take to be unauthorized use.
Finally, even if technology should be questioned when alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost are affected, it is not at all obvious what the answer should be. Analysts who use the word “commodification” generally think that this kind of change is a bad thing, but economists who talk about reducing transaction costs generally think just the opposite. In both cases, there may be an understandable but false assumption that the material infrastructure of the world is relatively fixed, so that the processes in question always involve manipulations of law and policy. This assumption may then map transformations in alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost onto rather well-worn political ideologies. Hence, “commodification” is bad because it favors capitalist or bourgeois interests, while lowering transaction costs is always good because it allows rational agents to more successfully maximize the satisfaction of subjective preferences. Even if this is generally correct for changes in formal institutions, which I doubt, it will simply not do as a sweeping analysis of technical change.
The foregoing discussion is intended to explain how alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost become incorporated into technologies, and why these features are particularly important from an ethical or political perspective. But perhaps it is still not obvious how they are relevant to design. In one sense, designers (by which I, with the other authors in this volume, mean those who make decisions about key features, standards and configurations of a tool or technique) have long been attentive to these features. When engineers develop a feature for a product that will be technically difficult or costly for competitors to duplicate, they are affecting the rivalry and exclusion cost of the product. When they develop “work-arounds” to avoid licensing costs, they are responding to aspects of alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost that have been formally institutionalized through patent law. When equipment manufacturers utilize a strategy of “planned obsolescence,” they are ensuring rivalry between the product they make today and a product they will make in the future.
There has, however, been little previous attention to these institutional features in the philosophy of technology. This chapter thus brings some fairly standard aspects of design into view for philosophers. Yet some of the examples discussed above had institutional impacts that no one foresaw or intended. It is doubtful that those who developed roads and wagons intended to affect farmers’ ability to alienate the grain growing in their fields from the local village economy. It is also worth noting that any attempt to make a normative evaluation of how a given design affects institutions will depend a great deal on very specific aspects of the technology in question, as well as the socio-economic environment in which it will be deployed. Thus there does seem to be some room for designers and philosophers alike to give renewed attention to institutional impact in developing a new product or a new configuration of technical means. Any ex ante use of the considerations described in this chapter to plan and evaluate technical design will need to be fleshed out with an economic analysis (see North, 1990), as well as a great deal of specific detail that only designers themselves can provide.
Lawrence Lessig’s detailed studies of the way that technical codes affect alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost for software and the Internet provide one of the best examples of how recent design questions involve institutions. Lessig contrasts the design of internet architecture at Harvard and the University of Chicago, showing how the Chicago system has inherently high exclusion cost incorporated into its code. The result is that the Harvard design permits system administrators to make case by case decisions about when barriers will be lowered for a given user (Lessig, 1999). Lessig also argues that net protocols might have been designed so that movement of bits over the network was application specific. That is, the protocol for transferring text files might have been different from that of moving bits that code for MP3 or video. This would have introduced a form of rivalry into the system that would have facilitated centralized control, as opposed to the information commons that currently exists (Lessig, 2002). Lessig’s work shows that when we question the institutional implications of technology, we will need to look closely at the actual implications of a specific technical change before we will be in a position to speak about whether it is good or bad. It is to his work that designers wishing to operationalize the ideas in this chapter should turn.