the motif of the gifting logos; to have lots is to know lots, according to the discourses of expertise in the digital commons. The bigger the data, the better the expertise. In the abundant digital networks of the commons, delivery and access are thus fully wedded; any and all things that circulate in the networks to which commoners have access are entirely assessible (access-able) to them. Expertise, measured in bulk, functions such that the more of it that is delivered to nodes in the network, the more of it the nodes can absorb. On this point, the gifting logos aligns with the history of rhetoric in which copia has been associated with expertise and knowledge, specifically how expressions may be multiplied so that a subject may be fully understood. A subject is made knowable through repetition that produces an abundant result. In digital networks, the scale and speed of copia are distinguishable from more traditional forms of repetition. With speed and scope operating in tandem, the abundance of digital “stuff” effectively becomes immersive, a substance mediating between digital commoners.
The gifting logos is time sensitive and progressivist.
Because it is a rhetorical practice, the gifting logos is necessarily time sensitive, attuned to kairotic moments of appropriate intervention. Further, because it is a gifting practice, timing is everything; timing enables a meaningful gift. For example, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, time variously constrains the gifting logos as productive expertise via the structure of copyright, which dictates that the ownership privileges of expertise are contingent on time. The basic tenet of copyright is that those who create materials are entitled to enjoy the benefits of their creation for a limited time. Expertise as content is thus timed. Adding another layer, the gifting logos manages time-as-history, indeed makes time, through the retrieval technology of digital archiving. The Wayback Machine, as I demonstrate in chapter 3, gives the past of the digital commons to the commoners, making digitized history knowable. Finally, the time sensitivity of the giving logos is set to “urgent”; digital commoners are called, for example by the Pirate Party in chapter 4, to act quickly in order to ensure a happy and prosperous future. Via the gifting logos, expertise refers both to making history knowable (accessible via a screen) and to the historical progress of technologies that serve networks of the commons.185
The gifting logos assumes a rhetorically playful posture toward its “others.”
Unlike the serious affect that characterizes traditional expertise, enabling experts to be taken seriously as such, the gifting logos often operates in a playful and irreverent mode. It is a rhetorical epistemic habit that distinguishes itself from other epistemic habits and hierarchies by being un-serious. In so doing, it facilitates critique of these others via comic subversion and parody. Whereas traditional politicians are serious, for example, the Pirate Party is deliberately unconventional and, for lack of a better word, cool. Whereas copyright law is dull and antiquated, the Creative Commons is agile and cutting edge, giving the commons access to information and pop culture. Whereas brick-and-mortar archives and archivists are dusty institutional holdovers from another era, the Wayback Machine is a whimsically named technology for time travel. In each case, the rhetorical posture of not taking oneself too seriously frames expertise, allowing it to function in ways that traditional conditions would preclude. This posture, I argue in the conclusion, disarms two sets of questions that confront expertise in the twenty-first century. First, are the habits that function as expertise in the digital commons recognizable by that term from a traditional perspective on productive epistemology? Are they really expertise? Second, does rhetorically constructing an activity as a gifting activity make it so? Can knowing and making be effectively integrated with gifting, or is the latter a façade for something else entirely? The networked expertise of the digital commons depends on that of the gifting logos’ to critique but also to destabilize traditional expertise and its authority.
2
The Infrastructural Commons
While writing this chapter, I took my four-year-old son to see a theater production of the folktale Stone Soup.1 A connoisseur even at his modest age, he loved the play. So the next time we went to the children’s library, I picked out The Real Story of Stone Soup, thinking it would be received with the same enthusiasm.2 I was wrong. The boy who had loved the live performance wholly rejected the book, which prompted a conversation about what “version” means. In the spirit of an educator parent, I tried patiently to explain that a single story can be told in different ways. Some stories, I suggested, may not be owned by anyone in particular, but instead tinkered with and adapted to suit various needs. My son was having none of it. Nevertheless, through our discussions of narrative play and transcultural myth, something emerged: important questions about artistic interpretation, situatedness in particular places and times, ownership of the human drama, the transmission of privileged knowledge, and engagements between community insiders and outsiders.
Although not about fairytales or soup per se, this chapter explores the kind of experiential, inventive, communal practices that the legend’s culinarian stranger enacts, wherein to know is to make and to make is to gift. The man who comes to town possesses the knowledge not only to make soup, but to live a precarious life defined by the making of soup. His expertise is inextricable from his situatedness in the world, a condition that depends on the invention and delivery of a substantive gift; the man’s knowledge and experience—his gift to his ever-changing hosts—are soup. For my purposes, the soup corresponds roughly to what copyright law calls “expressive content”: music, photography, film and video, text, design, and imagery in digital form. This kind of content is the reification of what its producers experience and know within the context of their lives. The expressive content, for the purposes of this chapter, may be thought of as what I define in chapter 1 as “stuff.” As noted there, “stuff” is a handy term for digital cultural content, reflecting both ubiquity and a smudged line between what is material and immaterial. It refers at once to tangible things and symbolic currency. Further, it captures a performative dimension, as in the phrase “to strut one’s stuff.” In the digital commons, stuff is both the products and processes of invention that demand an integration of knowing and/as making and/as gifting.
My study of the gifting logos turns in this chapter to the Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization primarily associated with a suite of licenses that negotiates copyright.3 Challenging the legal and technical mechanisms of copyright, the Creative Commons licenses supply makers of digital artifacts with a structure for distributing their “stuff” beyond the “all rights reserved” default premise. A simple example is a musician who attaches a Creative Commons license to a song, making that song freely accessible to anyone who might want to listen to it, slice it up into beats and riffs, make new music, and license the new music likewise. Another is a graphic designer and software programmer seeking publicity and membership in a professional network that coheres around collaboratively produced content. Of primary interest to my analysis is the question: How is expertise rhetorically managed in this process? How is the interplay of knowledge and experience that happens in the making of cultural artifacts like text, code, and music accounted for by those who participate in the digital commons, specifically via the Creative Commons infrastructure? What is expertise in this infrastructure?
In response to these questions, I offer the notion of the gifting logos as expertise. To demonstrate how the gifting logos functions in the Creative Commons, I analyze a set of discourses: (1) the 2015 Creative Commons memorandum “The State of the Commons,” with appended data sheets; (2) The Power of Open, the Creative Commons’s self-published collection of success stories; (3) the history, vision statement, and general user instructions published on the organization’s website; and (4) three academic articles and two popular books authored by Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig during the initiative’s early stages.4 I argue that the production and circulation of cultural “stuff” is framed by the Creative Commons as expertise that subsumes gifting. I argue
