0 Conclusion: Putting Cultural Environmentalism into Practice

The premise of this book has been that meaningful reform in information law and information policy requires a deep and fundamental rethinking of the most basic assumptions on which they are founded. Properly understood, “cultural environmentalism” requires engagement with culture in all its messy, materially embedded heterogeneity, and demands that we learn to value privacy as well as access and interstitial complexity as well as seamless rationalization. Put differently, it requires change in a culture that thinks culture and materiality unimportant and that treats gaps in market and informational frameworks as imperfections to be eliminated. That argument, though, suggests a chicken-andegg problem: cultural change and legal change are both necessary, but each is dependent on the other. How are we to begin? A final lesson from everyday practice, however, is that practice does not need to wait for an official version of culture to lead the way. It seems appropriate, therefore, to close this extended meditation on the necessity of putting practice into cultural environmentalism with some thoughts on strategies for putting cultural environmentalism into practice.