The apparent absence of artifice — one might say, the calculated absence of artifice — so dominates California’s cultural and natural landscape that when I return from a trip out West, as I just did, I have to spend a few days cognitively re-situating myself in the manufactured East.
What that means is that I’m a native Californian who has lived in Pittsburgh for a long time. Each occasional re-immersion in the land of my youth means re-assessing that place in light of my current experience. As part of “Code,” Lessig once distinguished “West Coast Code” (computer code — open, networked, bottom-up) from “East Coast Code” (legal code — closed, proprietary, top-down), noting that each “regulated” behavior, but in different ways. But I think that he (as a native Pennsylvanian) mis-read the Californian metaphor. California’s contribution to contemporary jurisprudence — to thinking about code, and openness, and to IP and tech and culture — cuts quite differently.
The leftmost edge of the US is about utopianism — just as so much of the US in general is dominated by utopianism — but utopianism of a very specific flavor, and utopianism unlike the utopianism of the contemporary East Coast.
East Coast utopianism is often about Being. In Pittsburgh, for example, Pittsburgh exceptionalism about who “we” (Pittsburghers) “are” (we’re amazing!) dominates all sorts of public conversations. And Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers are hardly alone among Eastern communities in their self-regard for their present (if sometimes unrecognized or unrewarded) greatness, but they are uncommon (and therefore an uncommonly good example) for the linkages among achievement, greatness, and place. Pittsburgh today is an interesting city, even occasionally cool or hip, precisely because it is so explicit and obvious about its interest in recapturing and then repurposing its 20th century glory. There is 21st century glory ahead, but — as in Boston, or New York, or even Cleveland — 21st century glory is about affirming and extending existing glory. We already occupy the promised land.
West Coast utopianism is about Becoming. Existing communities don’t make the point as clearly as new communities do (whether existing communities includes only big ones, like San Francisco or Los Angeles, or small ones, like San Luis Obispo); novelty, in fact, is the entire point. Few in California have achieved their utopian vision; utopia is by definition always a work in progress. We are designing utopias — entirely new places. We are headed *to* the promised land, or we are *building* the promised land. The New York Times just carried a couple of short pieces that, juxtaposed, make the point all too clearly. “Utopia Rules at Sea Ranch, a Community Born of ’60s Idealism,” about the Sea Ranch planned second-home community on the bluffs between Bodega Bay and Mendocino (my family was one of many that vacationed at Sea Ranch in the 1970s) appeared at the same time as “The Happiness Project,” about Disneyland. Behavioral rules and regulations at Disneyland are legendary, whether we’re thinking of customer behavior or staff behavior. That’s the utopian design. The idyll of Sea Ranch was/is no less scripted, architecturally and behaviorally.
West Coast “code” is, in other words, just as law-specific and regulatory in a traditional sense as East Coast “code” is. Apple and Google — West Coast code in Lessig’s sense — are Disney-ish, in a digital context. But they are forward-looking rather than backward-looking.
Walt Disney himself was, in a way, the Steve Jobs of an earlier, pre-digital era, a showboating aesthetic imperialist who had an instinct for producing extraordinarily inspiring and comforting cultural objects. (I visited the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, which is a great place and which reminded me constantly of the Disney/Jobs resemblance. I am far from the first person to notice it.) Mickey Mouse was the totalizing cultural icon, the iPhone, of 80 years ago, a cheap entree to the E-ticket ride of the future. Up at Sea Ranch, the visioneer behind that project, Lawrence Halprin, played the same role. Sea Ranch represents the California natural sublime; Disneyland represents the California cultural sublime. Of course, they are the products of quite distinct utopian impulses; Fred Turner’s history “From Counterculture to Cybereculture” explains.
Does this all have anything to do with IP law? In a general, conceptual sense, I think so. IP policy in the US is understood to be guided by “progress,” a word and metaphor that comes from the US Constitution and that pays off in the copyright concept of “originality” and the patent concepts of “novelty” and “nonobviousness.” IP law speaks directly to collective interests in new stuff; new stuff makes us collectively better, in some way. But to what end? My Californian bias suggests that “progress” should be informed by a “Becoming” utopianism rather than a “Being” utopianism. (Which is hardly an uncomplicated resolution, to be sure.) Much IP debate and discussion today, it seems to me, is “Being” rather than “Becoming.”
To be continued. My next stop is Philadelphia!