I am writing this as i think it up. So excuse the mistakes.
Why am I talking about feudal ages? Because they are a period of time in human history which, I believe, are representative of what happens when too much of power is concentrated in too few hands.
And why do I welcome you back to them? Because I believe that, again, we might be marching towards a situation where too much power is being concentrated in too few hands.
Think about it, what was the source of power in medieval times? Land.
Land provided you food, land provided you minerals, land provided you with a place to stay. The more land you controlled the more powerful you were.
Even the Vatican, derived a lot of its power through its control, though indirect, of who could be the king and thus control the land in a given area. Victorious were rewarded through allotment of land, losers had their lands taken away from them. So, the consequence was that land was parceled among various claimants: kings and queens, and prices and churches.
But the problem was that the actual people who could use this land to produce something, the peasants. were very rarely, owners. The powerful would rent out the land to the peasants. Most of the fruits of labour were taken away by the powerful, with pittance for peasants. This made peasants disinclined to work hard, be innovative with their production process. This stifled improvements in agriculture and food produce was never so much to free a large proportion of population to be inventors and scientists.
In fact, the break from the feudal ages happened when the european civilization had long encounters with arabs. The exchanges with the arabian world brought forth new technologies. This led to a shift in the source of power. Slowly technology became the source of power rather than land. Who ever was more advanced technologically had more power. Whoever had better guns, better food production systems was more powerful.
If we look at any other culture, we will notice that its stagnation happened whenever the source of power (or the bottleneck resource for production, if you control that resource you control production) in that culture became concentrated in a small group and rest of the society had to pay rent to be able to use that resource.
In India, initially, the bottleneck resource was not land. Land was productive enough to produce a surplus. widespread famines were not prevalent in much of pre-british era. Instead, the limiting resource was knowledge. Majority of the knowledge transfer happened through verbal methods. Verbal methods do not allow for rapid dissemination of knowledge to large masses. Whatever was written knowledge, it became the preserve of brahmins who guarded it jealously. The caste system also made it difficult for people to be exposed to new knowledge. And hence, the peasants, the craftsmen used the same tools, the same methods year after year. And when the industrial revolution came, india was not prepared to take advantage of it.
Anyway, the point of all this discussion is that we might be heading again for the same situation. Our, as a civilization, primary source of power is knowledge. And with patents and copyright laws, it is being controlled by smaller and smaller groups. this is especially evident in dna research, medicines, discovery of new molecules, software etc. These owners dont want to sell their technology. They would rather license(rent) it out and earn on them.
There are companies cropping up whose method of operation is to buy obscure patents and earn by licensing them out to others. They dont research , innovate or discover anything. They just keep track of any new innovation and discovery and try to buy it out before the market knows about it.
This method of operation again separates the owners from the actual users. Which will mean that the users will not be encouraged to innovate on anything they rent.
As the owners become powerful by accumulating more and more knowledge and simply renting them out, they would naturally desire that any innovations made, which depended on knowledge owned by them, should result in payments made to them.
If you look at medicines, large areas of molecular research are difficult to get into because they require using patented molecules and there is disagreement between the patent owning company and the company desiring to use it.
With patent regimes being enforced more and more throughout the world, we will see more problems in sorting out the ownership of the innovation and deciding who all should benefit from a particular innovation. Plus the fact that the owners (mostly companies) of the innovation are getting separated from innovators(mostly a small group of people) is going to cause even more heartburns.
All these things make me feel that we are about to enter another phase where there will be decline in the pace of innovation and development. Unless something happens which changes the source of power or there is change in the knowledge ownership system itself.
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Okay, I know that this theory is not backed by data or enough research to be foolproof. Its not that I am very sure that this is going to happen. The society around us is not a linear system with two or three factors determining the outcome. It is pretty complex. There are large number of factors influencing any course society takes. The source of power now (knowledge and the rule of law used to protect ownership) can change very quickly, especially the rule of law.
But I do believe that the ownership of knowledge is shifting to companies rather than individuals. companies are getting more and more powerful while being fewer in number. We also have the problem that as companies get more powerful, it will get more and more difficult to make laws that would affect the companies adversely. So it will become more and more difficult for individuals to do something independent of companies.
This increased power and decreased numbers is going to cause a lot of problems. Innovation is just one of them.
