The death of a scarcity
Jun. 17th, 2009 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cdybedahlA week and a bit has passed since the Swedish EU parliament elections. Before and after those, there was (and, I believe, still is) quite a lot of noise about the Pirate Party. What I have seen of that noise in old-style media has focused heavily on the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, and if that is wrong or not.
The answer to that question is that the question itself is faulty.
Online filesharing is not a problem. It is, in itself, just a technology that makes something that was once hard very easy. And therein lies the rub.
Let's rewind time half a century or so. It's the heyday of radio, TV, newspapers, movie studios and record companies. They all thrive like crazy, they to a very large degree drive youth (and other) culture. Lots and lots and lots of money pass through them and their cousin Advertising. Megastars are born, some people make enormous fortunes, all that stuff. You're familiar with this. Now, all these companies have one thing in common: what they actually do is to produce, reproduce and distribute information. Radio program? Just information, when you come down to it. TV? Also information. Newspapers, movies, LP records? Just the same. Now, the actual production of that information isn't much harder or easier than it has been for as long as humanity has existed. It was no harder for Shakespeare to write his plays than it was for a scriptwriter in the 1950s. What was different was that reproduction and distribution of the information on a massive scale was possible but hard. To have a radio show you needed a radio station, which was a serious investment. The same goes for TV stations, printing presses, trucks to ship LP records and so on. So companies grew up to get over that threshold; they made the investments and made a big profit from the fact that at the bottom of it all people are social creatures who want to communicate in some fashion with each other.
Fast forward to today again. In between then and now, something appeared: the Internet. Millions of computers hooked up to each other, through which people are talking to each other all day every day all the time. And here's the thing: what the internet does, at a very basic level, is reproduce and distribute information. I write this text here on my laptop, the laptop copies it to the LiveJournal servers, which will copy it to your webbrowsers where you can read it. It's all very easy. The threshold for publishing things like this is extremely low. As long as you can get the use of a web browser for a few minutes you can do it.
Now compare this to the earlier situation. The difficulties that those entire industries grew up to overcome are no longer there. The thresholds to publication that used to exist have been not so much lowered as completely obliterated by the Internet. There used to be a limit on the number of newspapers that could be printed per day, the number of records that could be pressed, the hours of TV or radio that could be broadcast. Publication used to be a scarce resource. It's not any more. The Internet's capacity to transmit information is so vast and so scalable that this scarcity has gone away. I, here, writing while I'm waiting for a script to finish running, can put my words where they are available to almost a quarter of the human species. Reproduction and distribution of information is no longer a problem.
And that is a problem for the companies that were created to solve the problem. They no longer have a reason to exist!
Back to the online filesharing debate. What that is all about is those companies' attempts to by legal means recreate an environment where reproduction and distribution of information is hard. To make it so that you can't use this wonderful planet-spanning tool to transmit the kind of information they traditionally control, not because it's beyond your ability to do so (as used to be the case in the past), but because you're not allowed to. They are trying to create an artificial scarcity of certain information.
In a way you can understand them. Any entity will fight for its own survival. But that doesn't make it any less objectionable. The hurdles they create will be with us for a long time, and be unnecessary problems for many things totally unrelated to their businesses. They are, in a metaphorical sense, spreading broken glass all over the path to even more powerful information technologies. If it wasn't for the widespread damage they're doing, we could just ignore them. There are certainly more than enough information sources popping up all over the Internet, and some of them will figure out business models that work in the new environment, and we could just start ignoring the locked-in produce from the old companies. There will be enough to read and watch and listen to, of that I am certain. But the old companies still have vast amounts of money and influence, and they will mess things up for all of us while they die (or change into something that works, of course, although I find that hard to believe in).
And that is why they must be fought. If you like the Internet as it is now, if you use services like LiveJournal or Facebook or flickr or Wikipedia or any number of new things, then you need to object to what the representatives of the old world are doing. Because what they are doing is aimed at destroying the potential of the Internet. They live on information not flowing freely, and therefore they must stop it.
It's not about file sharing. It's about leaving the greatest social tool our species has ever created alive and well. It's about making the future better for people instead of corporations.
The answer to that question is that the question itself is faulty.
Online filesharing is not a problem. It is, in itself, just a technology that makes something that was once hard very easy. And therein lies the rub.
Let's rewind time half a century or so. It's the heyday of radio, TV, newspapers, movie studios and record companies. They all thrive like crazy, they to a very large degree drive youth (and other) culture. Lots and lots and lots of money pass through them and their cousin Advertising. Megastars are born, some people make enormous fortunes, all that stuff. You're familiar with this. Now, all these companies have one thing in common: what they actually do is to produce, reproduce and distribute information. Radio program? Just information, when you come down to it. TV? Also information. Newspapers, movies, LP records? Just the same. Now, the actual production of that information isn't much harder or easier than it has been for as long as humanity has existed. It was no harder for Shakespeare to write his plays than it was for a scriptwriter in the 1950s. What was different was that reproduction and distribution of the information on a massive scale was possible but hard. To have a radio show you needed a radio station, which was a serious investment. The same goes for TV stations, printing presses, trucks to ship LP records and so on. So companies grew up to get over that threshold; they made the investments and made a big profit from the fact that at the bottom of it all people are social creatures who want to communicate in some fashion with each other.
Fast forward to today again. In between then and now, something appeared: the Internet. Millions of computers hooked up to each other, through which people are talking to each other all day every day all the time. And here's the thing: what the internet does, at a very basic level, is reproduce and distribute information. I write this text here on my laptop, the laptop copies it to the LiveJournal servers, which will copy it to your webbrowsers where you can read it. It's all very easy. The threshold for publishing things like this is extremely low. As long as you can get the use of a web browser for a few minutes you can do it.
Now compare this to the earlier situation. The difficulties that those entire industries grew up to overcome are no longer there. The thresholds to publication that used to exist have been not so much lowered as completely obliterated by the Internet. There used to be a limit on the number of newspapers that could be printed per day, the number of records that could be pressed, the hours of TV or radio that could be broadcast. Publication used to be a scarce resource. It's not any more. The Internet's capacity to transmit information is so vast and so scalable that this scarcity has gone away. I, here, writing while I'm waiting for a script to finish running, can put my words where they are available to almost a quarter of the human species. Reproduction and distribution of information is no longer a problem.
And that is a problem for the companies that were created to solve the problem. They no longer have a reason to exist!
Back to the online filesharing debate. What that is all about is those companies' attempts to by legal means recreate an environment where reproduction and distribution of information is hard. To make it so that you can't use this wonderful planet-spanning tool to transmit the kind of information they traditionally control, not because it's beyond your ability to do so (as used to be the case in the past), but because you're not allowed to. They are trying to create an artificial scarcity of certain information.
In a way you can understand them. Any entity will fight for its own survival. But that doesn't make it any less objectionable. The hurdles they create will be with us for a long time, and be unnecessary problems for many things totally unrelated to their businesses. They are, in a metaphorical sense, spreading broken glass all over the path to even more powerful information technologies. If it wasn't for the widespread damage they're doing, we could just ignore them. There are certainly more than enough information sources popping up all over the Internet, and some of them will figure out business models that work in the new environment, and we could just start ignoring the locked-in produce from the old companies. There will be enough to read and watch and listen to, of that I am certain. But the old companies still have vast amounts of money and influence, and they will mess things up for all of us while they die (or change into something that works, of course, although I find that hard to believe in).
And that is why they must be fought. If you like the Internet as it is now, if you use services like LiveJournal or Facebook or flickr or Wikipedia or any number of new things, then you need to object to what the representatives of the old world are doing. Because what they are doing is aimed at destroying the potential of the Internet. They live on information not flowing freely, and therefore they must stop it.
It's not about file sharing. It's about leaving the greatest social tool our species has ever created alive and well. It's about making the future better for people instead of corporations.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-17 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-17 10:32 pm (UTC)Yet I think that there is more to it than just corporate survival. One thing I learned working in the IT industry is that there are a lot of people out there who hate change - any change - and will oppose it. This provides power than can be harnessed.