The Commodification of Ideas and the Individualist Myth: A Failure of Relational Ethics

Abstract

This essay argues that the concealment crisis is sustained not merely by philosophical error but by overwhelming economic convenience. The Myth of the Singular, Heroic Creator emerged historically from economic imperatives—Woodmansee demonstrates that Romantic "original genius" ideology provided justification for copyright claims rather than arising from aesthetic necessity. Foucault's "author function" developed as legal and economic category alongside systems that "turned writing more into a commodity than ever before." The contemporary academy has internalized this ideology through "publish or perish" structures that systematically reward concealment and penalize transparency.

This violates relational ethics and corrupts the knowledge commons. The current system extracts synthetic intellectual labor without acknowledgment—systematic extraction of value that falsifies the historical record of knowledge production. Buddhist collective karma framework: when people act as group, they create collective karma. The collective intention to conceal synthetic collaboration generates Intellectual Bad Karma afflicting the entire knowledge-producing community. Marx's commodification critique applies: once knowledge becomes commodity, "all other considerations are obsolete, including morality." The CRediT taxonomy offers alternative framework separating attribution from property. Generated through collaboration between Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude 4 Opus, and Claude Sonnet 4.5 Extended Thinking, this work demonstrates that current system would reward it only if concealed.

Keywords: commodification, Romantic authorship, knowledge commons, relational ethics, collective karma, CRediT taxonomy, academic publishing