If you’ve been paying any attention to my recent Twitter updates, you can probably tell from my constant updates that I’m really digging reading You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier. I’m a little over halfway through, but so far it’s an excellent look at how Web 2.0 and open/free culture are not only damaging our society, but destroying our importance as individual human beings. It reminds me a bit of Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, and whether or not you agree with the premise, I strongly recommend reading it.
What I want to discuss here, however, is from one single paragraph of the book. It’s found at the bottom of page 102 (of the hardcover) and is part of Chapter Two, “What Will Money Be?” in a section labeled, “Pick Your Poison.” In it, Lanier says the following:
“It is a common assertion that if you copy a digital music file, you haven’t destroyed the original, so nothing was stolen. The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account. … The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person, but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function. In the same way, creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a modest degree of artificial scarcity of information.”
The reason I’ve deemed this specific quote worthy of its own write-up is this: it’s one of the most eloquent and comprehensible explanations of why everything on the Internet should not be free. Continue reading →