Creative Commons
One of my all-time favourite writers, Cory Doctorow, uses Creative Commons all the time. In fact, I’m pretty sure at one point, all his books were available for free download on his website craphound.com. A lot of Cory’s work has to do with making knowledge freely accessible through sharing and collaborative effort, which—as a 12-year-old kid obsessed with technology—deeply appealed to me, and he instilled that value in me which remains even to this day.
A funny story happened when I reached high school: I had to do a book report on one of his novels (I got to choose the book, so naturally I chose one by Cory), and I emailed him asking about one of his characters. He got back to me within the week, and I was actually able to cite his own words in my school essay. Super cool stuff!
But anyway, this idea that knowledge should be free is one of the fundamental tenets of what I will call the “Golden Age of the Internet.” Long before big tech and copyright providers cracked down on infringements, the Internet—for the first time in human history—made sharing possible. Of course, this had the most impact on people who had meagre finances and can’t necessarily afford books, encyclopedias, or have a well-stocked library close to them. If people romanticize the Library of Alexandria, we have something far, far more incredible at work in our modern age of binary and silicon.
So what does the Creative Commons stand for? Broadly, I’d say it’s that same free-sharing of knowledge that Cory instilled in me long ago. It’s the idea that these ideas are bigger than any one person, and while it is right and just to give credit where it’s due, we are all building off of the achievements and insights of those who came before us.
There’s a quaint little problem in philosophy that has existed since the time of Kant, which asks us to consider if synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. (Synthetic: two ideas put together. A Priori: known prior to experience.) Some people would say no, because if you already know it, then it cannot be synthesized—the idea being that if we have x amount of knowledge a priori, then deduction from that knowledge doesn’t actually produce anything new. We are just following the implications of something that was already known.
I like to think that most of what I do here, while it may be my own work, is more than I’d care to admit just me building on the shoulders of giants. And as someone who is a philosopher at heart, if someone can stand taller than me, then I am pleased to see them do so.