The Anarchist in the Coffee House: A Brief Consideration of Local Culture, the Free Culture Movement, and Prospects for a Global Public Sphere

Abstract

"This article examines one particular Public Sphere experiment - the rise of a global 'Free Culture Movement' that aims to limit the spread of strong intellectual property regimes. It also considers the complications encountered by the Free Culture Movement when it crosses a very different value set at work in global cultural policy debates - the protection of native or local culture exemplified by the Native Culture Movement. Through this case study, I suggest that perhaps the Public Sphere is not the best model to idealize when we think globally and dream democratically. Habermas's Public Sphere is as temporally and geographically specific as Benedict Anderson's notion of 'imagined communities' and similarly has been inflated to cover disparate experiences that do not precisely map to the specific historical experience the original work covers."