Napster, Private Property and the Internet "Revolution"

By William Wharton

"The sense of private property - freed of its alienation - is the existence of essential objects for man, both as object for enjoyment and object of activity."

Karl Marx The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Part I Vol. 3

Each new commercial hails the "revolution" in computing, a new "revolutionary" program or a "revolutionary" new Internet community. The word revolution seems to be splashed across every other page of mainstream media. As defined by Madison Ave., the new meaning of "revolution" lies in the "transformation without a transformation," a new chapter in the consumer revolution, where society can be transformed at the click of a mouse and the insertion of a credit card. Stripped of its real transformative qualities, "revolution" is the shiny new package employed to advertise the notion of progress to increasingly numb American consumers. However, like the genie in the bottle that wakes at the recantation of its name, the transformative qualities of revolution - the questioning of all existing social relations - have begun to rear their collective heads.

Napster and Private Property

Created by a first-year computer science student at Northwestern University, the basic ideal of the "Napster community", which is in line with a more radical definition of the term revolution, is that if ownership is collective there are no owners. Members who log onto the system do not pay a fee but agree to have their private music collections placed into a library that is downloadable by any other member. The member who wishes to hear a song from your library can then access it and transfer a copy to her/his own collection. In this sense, there are no financial transactions per se, just the unlimited sharing of products.