GRAND THEFT TECHNO

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 205/  14/08/2011

Watching CCTV footage of the London riots shot from a high perspective, it was hard not to be reminded of video games like Grand Theft Auto. I don't want to open up that rusting can of worms about whether or not violent games cause imitation - the most I'll say is that these games perhaps provide an aesthetic for violence that happens anyway. The way participants wear their hoods, the way they leap to kick in windows, even the way they run now appears a little choreographed because we've seen the games. But this rather superficial observation underestimates the influence of digital technologies in the riots. The role of Blackberry messaging and Twitter in mustering rioters at their selected targets has been chewed over by the mainstream press ad nauseam, and David Cameron is now rumbling about suspending such services during troubles. This fits in well with my prediction, back in Idealog 197, that governments are now so nervous about the subversive potential of social media that the temptation to control them is becoming irresistible.

The influence of technology goes deeper still. The two categories of goods most looted during the riots were, unsurprisingly, clothes and electronic devices and the reason isn't too hard to deduce - brands have become a crucial expression of identity to several generations of kids. Danny Kruger, a youth worker and former adviser to David Cameron put it like this in the Financial Times: "We have a generation of young people reared on cheap luxuries, especially clothes and technology, but further than ever from the sort of wealth that makes them adults. A career, a home of your own - the things that can be ruined by riots - are out of sight. Reared on a diet of Haribo, who is surprised when they ransack the sweetshop?"

The latest phase of the hi-tech revolution makes this gap feel wider still. Neither PCs nor laptops were ever very widely desired: only nerds could set them up and they were barely usable for the exciting stuff like Facebook or 3D games. Steve Jobs and his trusty designer Jonathon Ive, together with Sony and Nintendo, changed that for ever. Electronic toy fetishism really took off with the iPod (which just about every kid in the UK now possesses) but it reached a new peak over the last year with the iPad, ownership of which has quickly become the badge of middle-class status. These riots weren't about relative poverty, nor unemployment, nor police brutality, nor were they just about grabbing some electronic toys for free. They were a raging (tinged with disgust) against exclusion from full membership of a world where helping yourself to public goods - as MPs and bankers are seen to do - is rife, and where you are judged by the number and quality of your toys. They demonstrated a complete collapse of respect for others' property.

I've been arguing for years that the digital economy is a threat to the very concept of property. Property is not a relationship between persons and things but rather a relationship between persons *about* things. This thing is mine, you can't take it, but I might give it, sell it or rent it to you. This relationship only persists so long as most people respect it and those who don't are punished by law. The property relationship originally derives from two sources: from the labour you put into getting or making a thing, and from that thing's *exclusivity* (either I have or you have it but not both of us). Things like air and seawater that lack such exclusivity have never so far been made into property, and digital goods, for an entirely different reason, fall into this category. Digital goods lack exclusivity because the cost of reproducing them tends toward zero, so both you and I can indeed possess the same game or MP3 tune, and I can give you a copy without losing my own. The artist who originally created that game or tune must call upon the labour aspect of property to protest that you are depriving them of revenue, but to end users copying feels like a victimless crime and what's more one for which punishment has proved very difficult indeed.

I find it quite easy to distinguish between digital and real (that is, exclusive) goods, since most digital goods are merely representations of real things. A computer game represents an adventure which in real life might involve you being shot dead. But I wonder whether recent generations of kids brought up with ubiquitous access to the digital world aren't losing this value distinction. I don't believe that violent games automatically inspire violence, but perhaps the whole experience of ripping, torrents and warez, of permanent instant communication with virtual friends, is as much responsible for destroying respect for property as weak parenting is. Those utopians who believe that the net could be the basis of a "gift economy" need to explain precisely how, if all software is going to be free, its authors are going to put real food on real tables in real houses that are really mortgaged. And politicians of all parties are likely to give the police ever more powers to demonstrate that life is not a computer game.

[Dick Pountain is writing a game about a little moustachioed Italian who steals zucchini from his neighbour's garden, called "Grand Theft Orto"]