First, the fan on my laptop died last weekend, rendering me without a PC at home. I can’t blame the poor thing; it’s been on it’s last legs for months now, and the laptop itself is over four years old. Without the internets distracting me, I’ve seen a boost in productivity, though my blogging will likely be more intermittent than usual.

Second! my favorite non-profit organization Creative Commons has kicked off its annual fundraising campaign. You should consider donating so you can get a sweet t-shirt, and also to support a worthy mission. Saving the world from failed sharing is a noble goal, the people are amazing, and come on, look how good you can look in a CC t-shirt (that’s me in my superhero pose, for those of you keeping score at home). I cannot recommend Creative Commons highly enough. And tell your friends to send them lots of money too.

Most of what I’m doing now is for CC in one way or another. The most obvious is that I’m still a contractor. Half-hacker, half-data analyst is a good spot for me, I think. A few months back I helped the development team analyze their past fundraising efforts (statistics to the rescue!). My senior thesis was about Creative Commons. I’m still working on a broad research agenda — like, what do I want to study during my time in grad school — and I will almost certainly swing CC in there somehow.

The people I met at CC are utterly fabulous. I interned with Tim Hwang, Brian Rowe, Grace Armstrong, Steren Giannini, and Greg Grossmeier. Allison Domicone, who is particularly cool, was sort of an intern too, and of course who can forget Jane “I-can-drink-twice-as-much-as-you” Park.

I’m still doing some good work with Tim Hwang and his motley group of cool kids in Cambridge, MA. Tim also turned me on to Getting Things Done, perhaps the greatest productivity tool the world has ever known. And over time I have come to realize that a significant chunk of my t-shirt supply is CC swag. Check it out.

My work on free culture to date has been broad. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the economics of public copyright licensing, specifically studying Creative Commons licenses and adoption. I was a technology intern at Creative Commons in 2008, and I continue working as a contractor furthering internal metrics work on license adoption and API usage. While at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute I started a chapter of Students for Free Culture. Currently I am a researcher with the Web Ecology Project out of Cambridge, MA, studying activity on the internet. Additionally, along with my colleague Tim Hwang and others, we are drafting a standard of best practices for ensuring fair dealings in Terms of Services, which we call FriendlyTOS.

I see free culture and the internet as fundamentally dichotomous: the internet is the most effective means of connecting people humanity has yet developed, and the culture that develops when people interact is naturally free. My perspective is that to study free culture, one must necessarily study the internet. Similarly, to understand the internet one must understand what makes for a free culture. Thus my research agenda for studying free culture begins with studying the internet.

My work on the internet has another motivation. Through my work and studies I have felt a common thread: issues of free culture must be expressed more fundamentally and approached from a more essential angle. When I first studied free culture I used the lens of economics, trying to fit issues of copyright licensing, peer production, and personal freedom into models optimizing utility and minimizing cost. We all have our own “home” fields, be they sociology, law, cultural anthropology, philosophy, or computer science. But to study free culture, or to study the internet, one needs to transcend particular fields. A multidisciplinary approach to these topics is a good first approximation. However, I have come to believe that both the internet and free culture more broadly are important enough topics of study that they deserve their own specialized field.

I, along with a group of colleagues, have begun work to chart out a new academic discipline whose focus is a study of the internet. We call this field “web ecology,” emphasizing the interconnected nature of the social and technological systems that comprise the web. I see web ecology as an attempt to do science on the internet in much the same way as environmental science studies our natural environment. Web ecology takes a holistic view of the internet, viewing users and code as associated and dependent elements. It is empirical and experimentally-driven, creating falsifiable theories and models that will be refined or rejected based on observable data.

My interest in web ecology is in building an axiomatic approach to the complex phenomena that comprise the internet and free culture thereon. The time is right for innovative theorists to develop novel, simple, quantitative models that describe activity on the internet. I look to the example the field of economics has set, as I think there is great value in its approach: by rigorously formalizing, even “oversimplifying,” the complex dynamics of markets, economics deduces profound insight from first principles. The basic models of perfect competition and consumer choice theory conveniently summarize the salient features of the objects under study, and provide a stepping stone toward more complicated analyses. I believe the same approach will prove useful in studying the internet.

Next comes the small step from the internet to free culture. Arguments for free culture are prescriptive at their core. As an economist I am wary of moving on to normative statements (“what ought to be”) before positive science (“what is”) has been well-established. Here is how I see this process evolving. First, web ecology will provide foundational science of the internet. From the knowledge and findings of web ecology, policy makers and other interested parties will design policies and incentives to ensure a freer culture. Prescriptive work, like working for a free culture, will inform the direction descriptive research should take, like studying particular classes of online platforms.

Since this conception is somewhat abstract, let me build an example. Perhaps web ecology seeks to understand content production on the internet. It develops a model for the creation of a certain type of content, say a “remix,” and begins exploring different social and technological treatments that increase or decrease the number of remixes produced by an internet platform. Through studies of existing online platforms, and experiments on the same, web ecology can make stronger and more quantitative statements. For example, perhaps web ecologists find that the proportion of anonymous users on an image board is proportional to the amount of remix that happens, and more precise metrics can be related through a measurable coefficient. Then a start-up company that wants to build a platform for the creation of remixes can use the findings of web ecology to design its platform, adding an anonymous user option and encouraging the use of anonymous accounts. Or a government policy maker may decide that remixes should be encouraged, and authors legislation to protect the right to anonymity on the internet.

The three key challenges I see arising from the work laid out above are as follows:

1. Defining the principles and approach for a rigorous study of the internet.

Web ecology must define itself as a solid foundation of knowledge about the internet. This hard work will be taken up by academics and business people with an interest in actually understanding the web, rather than “experts” seeking to sell social media services based on shoddy data and methods.

2. Building a standardized set of tools and models for studying the internet.

Web ecology will adopt the tools and models of other fields when appropriate, and will build its own when no suitable work exists. Many fields will no doubt have a large body of work to contribute. At the same time, web ecology will express these models in a common language and a common framework uniquely suited to study activity on the internet.

My interest is in the interface of economics and the internet, notably building better economic models of hybrid economies and open licensing. The next step for economics is moving away from studying the scarcity of goods and services to more fundamental scarcities: those of time, attention, and reputation. I see this same process occurring in other fields, which will support the work of web ecology.

3. Expressing the tenets of free culture from the axioms of web ecology.

The bits and pieces which make up free culture – things like open licenses, remixes, sharing, and peer production – will be endemic to the models and methods of web ecology from the start. Having a focus on free culture inform the development of descriptive web ecology will be formative and fruitful, for both web ecology and free culture.

If we move in these directions, we will be on our way to building a first-principles approach to the study of free culture.

Then I checked out the Amazon store (wirelessly), which is similarly fabulous. I purchased Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments for a mere 99 cents — take a moment to note the fabulousness of the public domain. Got some samples of David Allen’s new books. Then my thoughts of new and exciting content to load up led me to Creative Commons-licensed books. It was downhill from there.

I tracked down The Future of Ideas, The Public Domain, and Viral Spiral, by Lawrence Lessig, Jamie Boyle, and David Bollier, respectively. “Wow, this is great,” I thought. “What other fabulous Creative Commons books can I download for free and read on my Kindle?”

Last night it came to me: Cory Doctorow is a CC junkie. I’ve wanted to check out Little Brother for months now, but given my budget constraints on book purchases, it hasn’t made the cut yet. I avoid reading fiction since the opportunity cost of reading time is so high, and non-fiction is far more “valuable”. I mean, if I want fiction, I can just watch hulu, right? Firefly is an amazing show after all. But I digress…

I threw Little Brother on my Kindle, and read a few pages. Oh that Cory Doctorow. He drew me in with his witty foreward, talking about how CC is wonderful and re-convincing me why books should be given away digitally. So I started reading the first chapter. And then I was hooked. It’s so frigging interesting. It doesn’t even feel like fiction, which I guess is scary that a dystopian future isn’t so far off. But I couldn’t stop reading. And now I should probably be doing other work, like returning emails or starting on Chemistry, but no, I’m going to go read Little Brother some more.

Stupid Cory Doctorow with his brilliant writing and his fascinating story line and his awesome glasses.