The New Technologies and the Constitution of ‘Theft’
Nalini Rajan · 2020
This chapter aims to rework the ways in which the new technologies erode the notion of private property. The new information technologies offer new management technologies of control, with the parallel increase of part-time and casual labour. The mimetic capabilities of the new information technologies lead to an even more resounding shattering of tradition. New protocols of computer language now integrate language pertaining to ‘theft’ and ‘private property’. The networked computer user was variously imagined as a high-status Brahmin, or alternatively, metropolitan heterosexual white male, who needed to protect himself from invading armies of lower castes or Black gay migrants, respectively. The chapter discusses the ill-advised and logically untenable move of traditional communities to copyright their cultures. In developing countries like India, copyright infringement may not be as serious a problem as it is in the West, simply because the enforcement mechanisms—when it comes to protecting intellectual property—are necessarily weak.