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value, as one generally does whenever he does a favor for a friend.
For me, the value being retrieved from going to the trouble of
writing these words is not so different from the value you re-
trieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible
“good,” which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow.
I mention this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of
relationship as the driving force in an information economy.
But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are
you “consuming” it (since, unlike a hamburger, these words will
remain after you’re done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger
you won’t subsequently, well… never mind.) Unlike real content,
like the stuff in a shipping container, these words have neither
grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike
gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot
further than others, depending on their interest and my elo-
quence, neither of which can be quantified.
It’s this simple: the new meaning of the word “content” is plain
wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It’s a usage that only arose
when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle
and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize
that their containers were melting away, along with their reason
to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the
time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records
and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn’t know what to call the
mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them.
Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket
(of whatever size), “content” actually represents a plot to make
you think that meaning is a
thing
. It isn’t. The only reason they
want you to think that it is, is because they know how to own
things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity,
and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in
order to increase their value.
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