Changes

It’s a bit of a funny story—at least to the extent that a story about a dissertation can be funny. I had gone to grad school with the intention of doing urban history, writing about the landscape, built environment, etc. My goal was to work with Elizabeth Blackmar, who has done a lot of incredible work about space, housing, property rights and so forth. However, in my second year I took a course in the School of Art at Columbia called “Open Source Culture,” and it got me thinking about the issues of copyright and technology that had been causing so much controversy at the time, particularly in terms of file-sharing. So I sort of made a switch from focusing on property in the physical sense of land and buildings to intellectual property.

The question that I found so urgent at the time was: if we are, as is so often said, in an information economy or a knowledge economy, then what happens to that form of capitalism when anyone can copy anything, at any time? This is going to become even more of an issue as 3D printing rapidly evolves—we’ll be copying not just music and books, but sofas and hedge-trimmers before long.