Manufacturing Scarcity: Online Poker, Digital Writing, and the Flow of Intellectual Property

In this article, I draw on data from a digital ethnography of the writing lives of professional online poker players to argue that localized intellectual property regimes can manifest themselves in the literate activity of textual production and circulation. These writers manipulate their composing practices, their writing spaces, and their relationships with readers in order to protect intellectual property and increase the value of texts by manufacturing scarcity. The writers considered here, many of whom are recent college graduates, have started online instruction businesses through which they self-publish and sell articles and ebooks that articulate poker theory using psychology, probability, statistics, and game theory. I show how their writing practices have changed as online poker instruction shifted from collaborative peer production of strategy texts to a more proprietary model of formalized instruction. As instructors and their students changed their online writing habits to protect information, issues of copyright protection became conflated with “idea protection” and started to permeate almost every aspect of textual production. Intellectual property concerns have influenced the mediums and modes in which these online writers have engaged as they have self-published work. Further, the measures they have taken to “protect” their intellectual property have depended on their relationships with students, their attitudes toward copyright, and their conception of the way information spreads.