Convergence/Enclosure

Nilo already touched on this, but the portrait that Lessig paints goes Jenkins one better -- it may be true that, potentially, convergence culture makes cultural resources more widely available than ever before, but the legal regime directly opposes this development. As Lessig puts it, "Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now." We might imagine a pitched battle here between what the technological enables and what the law restricts. But that, I think, would be misleading. Lessig's point, as I understand it, is that the technological developments themselves facilitate forms of restriction and enclosure that go far beyond what was possible in the pre-digital era. This is in part an issue of law, but also an issue of architecture. Empirically it's tempting to side with Jenkins -- I can have a lot more fun with collage culture now than ever before, and I have much wider access to information, texts, video, images, etc., than ever before (although this access is of course limited in important ways). For the moment it seems as if there's more slack than ever before. Lessig suggests this may be temporary -- and in terms of legitimate commercial culture the degrees of freedom and the slack is rapidly being eliminated. Nilo's observation regarding the BFF status of Jenkins and Lessig is a provocative one: to what extent, beyond their apparently opposed takes on the freedom of convergence culture, to they share an understanding of an underlying, implicit, commonality of interests between those who control culture past and those who seek to create the culture of the future? What happens if we replace this notion of underlying harmony with one of irreconcilable conflict?