Yesterday, Digg learned about fighting culture. Little over a month ago, so did the Hungarian government.

Culture isn’t quite an unstoppable force, nor an immovable object, but it’s a damn sight more resistant than most things.

Everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen the same patterns of wear: Brown lines in the grass, kinks in the ironwork, footprints on the fence rails. Culture is the force that quietly wears the corners down on patches of grass using trails upon trails. All paths exist for a reason, and if fences are put up on them, people climb over and walk around; if bars are put in the way, someone takes care of them with a scissor jack. Authority can fence what it likes, but when the bounds traverse culture it pushes right through them.

Most of the time, it doesn’t do it with drama and riots and blood. Culture tends not to make a fuss, instead, the most motivated actors riding a given value take care of the problems they perceive, often quietly. In OSS terms, this is the same as all bugs being shallow with enough pairs of eyes.

Culture is all about getting to places more efficiently. Not that it’s invulnerable to pathology, but a large part of culture is about the transmission of good, efficient ideas: Maximisation of utility aligned with motives. Cheap digital distribution without DRM is one of the most efficient things we’ve invented, and people have quickly come to value it enough to fight for it.

When culture is fought, it doesn’t matter if the values written into it are necessities or mere desires: it will fight back persistently and swamp its assailant. The assault started some years ago, and the swamping is now in effect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 23:34 and is filed under Copyfight, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.