Cultural Theory and Digital Balance

Currently, we are witnessing clashes of alternative governance approaches to the digital in various battlefields: there are fights over the relation between copyright v. public domain, over proprietary v. open-source software, and over freedom v. control in the Internet carriers "spectrum" and "broadband". Complaining about "a kind of McCarthyism that increasingly infects any debate about intellectual property in Washington", Lawrence Lessig recently pointed out in one of these fields that a robust "software ecosystem" based on a balance between proprietary and non-proprietary technology is better than either extreme.
Support of this view may come from a theory hitherto left unattended in the context of debates on governance in the digital: cultural theory. Such can be concluded from a new paper by Christoph Engel from the previously mentioned Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. Cultural theory counsels for the necessity of a balance and provides with insights in the appropriate kind of balancing.
(1) Cultural theory knows of four basic solidarities to explain cultural variance, differing by the extent to which an individual is incorporated into a larger social unit (group parameter) and by the extent to which an individual’s life is predetermined by heteronomous prescription (grid parameter): the hierarchic, the individualistic, the egalitarian, and the fatalistic. According to the normative insight of cultural theory no way of life is ever to fully win over its competitors. Since each solidarity highlights elements of nature and solidarity that are really out there, none of them should be allowed to be in a safe harbor.
For historically contingent reasons it happened that the egalitarian way of life was embedded in the technology of the Internet. Its original architecture disempowers both hierarchy and market. If individualists or hierarchists effectively impose their will on the Internet egalitarians, as they are increasingly doing nowadays, they risk hampering or even destroying the infrastructure on which more and more of their own activity is built (e.g. creation of new markets, of e-government, etc.). What is true for Internet regulation applies to the other conflict areas respectively (e.g. “Non-proprietary technology helps proprietary technology.”)
Conclusion: The individualists or the hierarchists should not give up their core concerns because isolated egalitarianism is no better than isolated individualism or isolated hierarchy. But the competing ways of life should carefully avoid damaging the egalitarian infrastructure of the Internet - for their own sake.
(2) Three ways of achieving a balance may be distinguished: negotiation, governance, organising co-existence. Each of them follows the logic of one of the three ways of life. Hence the problem: Balancing must be carried out across ways of life. But each way of life has a meta-preference for doing this its own way.
The solution seems to be the use of a neutral balancing technique. But such a method does not seem to be at hand. Perhaps it cannot exist at all. Anyway: there are hybrid approaches, mixing elements from two or even three active solidarities (see Engel, pp. 48). Ultimately, this calls for smart proceduralizations of the conflict between the basic solidarities in which none of them has to renounce its resources.