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cory doctorow
past. We don’t remember everything that happened to us, just se-
lective details. We weave our memories together on demand, fill-
ing in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around
in great abundance. In
Stumbling on Happiness,
Harvard psych
prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with
delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their
breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have
more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad
lunches. We don’t remember breakfast — we look at lunch and
superimpose it on breakfast.
We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much
as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel
the present into the holes. That’s why our pictures of the future
always seem to resemble the present, only more so.
So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they
took all the “information-based” businesses (music, movies, and
microcode, in the neat coinage of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel
Snow Crash
) and projected a future in which these would grow to
dominate the world’s economies.
There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world’s
economies consist of poor people who have more time than
money, and if there’s any lesson to learn from American college
kids, it’s that people with more time than money would rather
copy information than pay for it.
Of course they would! Why, when America was aborning, she
was a pirate nation, cheerfully copying the inventions of Euro-
pean authors and inventors. Why not? The fledgling revolution-
ary republic could copy without paying, keep the money on her
shores, and enrich herself with the products and ideas of impe-
rial Europe. Of course, once the U.S. became a global hitter in the
creative industries, out came the international copyright agree-
ments: the U.S. signed agreements to protect British authors
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