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JohN Perry Barlow
That, and the fact that after a good twenty-five years of ad-
vance warning, they still haven’t done much about the Economy
of Ideas besides trying to stop it from happening.
As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying “I told
you so.” But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the
Internet equivalent of the Pleistocene, I wrote a piece for an an-
cestor of
Wired
magazine called
Wired
magazine that was titled,
variously, “The Economy of Ideas” or “Wine without Bottles.” In
this essay, I argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue
to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the
relationship between scarcity and value to any products that
could be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost.
I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might
be scarce in such an economy, it would be attention, and that in-
visibility would be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in
other words,
familiarity
might convey more value to information
than scarcity would.
I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called “The Con-
tent Industry” — the institutions that once arose for the useful
purpose of conveying creative expression from one mind to many
— that this would be a good time to change their economic model.
I proposed that copyright had worked largely because it had been
difficult, as a practical matter, to make a book or a record or
motion picture film spool.
It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be
reduced into ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what
this “stuff” really was and come up with an economic paradigm
for rewarding its sources that didn’t seem as futile as claiming to
own the wind. Organizations would adapt. The law would change.
The notion of “intellectual property,” itself only about thirty-five
years old, would be chucked immediately onto the magnificent
ash-heap of Civilization’s idiotic experiments.
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