Imaginaries of Ownership: The Logic of Participation in the Moral Economy of 3D Software Design

Abstract

This article is designed to learn more about the increasing importance attributed to the logic of user participation and sharing (associated with the neoliberal Web 2.0) within and across institutional and platform boundaries. It aims to yield insight into the boundaries of a digital ethics in this context. For this purpose, the study draws on a prominent instance of 3D/games software culture where interdependencies can be seen to develop between institutions, users, and ICTs directing our attention to the exploration of ‘ownership’, thereby highlighting the boundaries of participation and competition. Drawing out the dynamics of ownership is an useful stratagem to yield insight into the mechanisms of production and cooperation. By interrogating the (organization of) social imaginaries involved as a means to draw out how different actors understand and make sense of these cross-border dynamics, it yields a perspective of ownership vis-à-vis the logic of participation, emphasizing – rather than legal conceptions per se – the make-up of negotiations and renegotiations guided by a distributed morality in software development between and across various institutional and platform boundaries.