13. Noospheric Property and the Ethology of Territory
To understand the consequences of property customs, it will help us
to look at them from yet another angle; that of animal ethology,
specifically the ethology of territory.
Property is an abstraction of animal territoriality, which evolved as
a way of reducing intra-species violence. By marking his bounds, and
respecting the bounds of others, a wolf diminishes his chances of
being in a fight which could weaken or kill him and make him less
reproductively successful.
Similarly, the function of property in human societies is to prevent
inter-human conflict by setting bounds that clearly separate peaceful
behavior from aggression. It is sometimes fashionable to describe
human property as an arbitrary social convention, but this is dead
wrong. Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers
came near its owner's property has experienced the essential
continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our
domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this
than a good many human political theorists.
Claiming property (like marking territory) is a performative act, a
way of declaring what boundaries will be defended. Community support
of property claims is a way to minimize friction and maximize
cooperative behavior. These things remain true even when the
``property claim'' is much more abstract than a fence or a dog's bark,
even when it's just the statement of the project maintainer's name in
a README file. It's still an abstraction of territoriality, and (like
other forms of property) our instinct-founded models of property are
territorial ones evolved to assist conflict resolution.
This ethological analysis at first seems very abstract and difficult to
relate to actual hacker behavior. But it has some important
consequences. One is in explaining the popularity of World Wide Web
sites, and especially why open-source projects with websites seem
so much more `real' and substantial than those without them.
Considered objectively, this seems hard to explain. Compared to the
effort involved in originating and maintaining even a small program,
a web page is easy, so it's hard to consider a web page evidence
of substance or unusual effort.
Nor are the functional characteristics of the Web itself sufficient
explanation. The communication functions of a web page can be as well
or better served by a combination of an FTP site, a mailing list, and
Usenet postings. In fact it's quite unusual for a project's routine
communications to be done over the Web rather than via a mailing list
or newsgroup. Why, then, the popularity of Web sites as project
homesıĵ
The metaphor implicit in the term `home page' provides an important
clue. While founding an open-source project is a territorial claim
in the noosphere (and customarily recognized as such) it is not a
terribly compelling one on the psychological level. Software, after
all, has no natural location and is instantly reduplicable. It's
assimilable to our instinctive notions of `territory' and `property',
but only after some effort.
A project home page concretizes an abstract homesteading in the space
of possible programs by expressing it as `home' territory in the more
spatially-organized realm of the World Wide Web. Descending from the
noosphere to `cyberspace' doesn't get us all the way to the real world
of fences and barking dogs yet, but it does hook the abstract property
claim more securely to our instinctive wiring about territory. And
this is why projects with web pages seem more `real'.
This ethological analysis also encourages us to look more closely
at mechanisms for handling conflict in the open-source culture. It
leads us to expect that, in addition to maximizing reputation
incentives, ownership customs should also have a role in preventing
and resolving conflicts.