A response to a post
Oct. 25th, 2006 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garotePosted in response to a response to a previous post. Whoo!
My good man, we have had information economies since we have had information, and a means - any means - of commoditizing it. :) (There is great argument over what the term "information economy" even means ... my definition is a liberal one.) The only difference between now and the past is the level of independence that types of content have gained from types of containers. We used to only be able to broadcast morse code via wire, and the airwaves were right out. Nowadays we can broadcast damn near anything via wire and airwaves alike, and manage the ways and means it is stored with much more flexibility.
But just because the costs are not apparent at the granular scale doesn't mean that the costs are irrelevant. Consider what total junk the internet would be if we couldn't get electric power (or just couldn't pay for it). Consider the manufacturing costs of the high-end switching equipment that forms the backbone of our networks (and again, who pays for it). Consider how, as the breadth of our information supply increases, exponentially more processing time is required to derive useful results from it. It still is an economy of service and scarcity - it's just got a big bendy electronic joint in the middle, and at one end of that joint you have a bunch of programmers sitting at keyboards ... and among them the occasional fruit loop who thinks he's part of a "post-materialist revolution" on account of how much his job is like the one George Jetson had, where he would just push one button over and over until his finger got sore, and then clock out for the day.
Also, I'd never make the claim that, just because I can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely, the media I have duplicated has no reason to be scarce anymore. In terms of economics, I think the argument should be approached from the other end:
So you can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely. Why would you? What would be your reason for doing that? Are you doing it to keep a backup? That seems wise. Are you doing it to give it to someone else for free? Okay; whatever flips your cookie... Are you doing it for a fee, or so that your friend can avoid a fee? Congratulations, you are participating in an economy of scarcity. In the first instance, you're attempting to enforce one - and in the second, you're attempting to subvert one!
Welcome to the murky for-profit fist-fight of the "new economy", where we encounter such weird edge cases as fake "name brand" bags, patented gene sequences, generic drugs, and boxed copies of Windows XP h4x()r Edition selling for two bucks each, next to the hotdogs on a street vendor's cart. (Ol' Mr. Dibbler will even throw in Madonna's last album for free, and that's cutting his own throat; he swears.)
For what it's worth, I predict that the internet will eventually be paved over by amalgamated content providers, as we all undergo an intimately related transition: Our home computers will be replaced by set-top boxes that browse the web and run iTunes, and are all-too-aware of the latest high tech encryption and DRM schemes. We will pay one cent a month for each AIM account we have, ten cents per minute of video we watch, ten cents per minute of audio we download, and 40 bucks a month just to keep the thing online. And one hundredth of a cent for each google search we invoke.
I suspect these boxes will all be running OS X.
It's not a terrible future, not really ... though it is a significantly less flexible one. And we can pretty much kiss our "post-materialist" Valhalla goodbye. :)
My good man, we have had information economies since we have had information, and a means - any means - of commoditizing it. :) (There is great argument over what the term "information economy" even means ... my definition is a liberal one.) The only difference between now and the past is the level of independence that types of content have gained from types of containers. We used to only be able to broadcast morse code via wire, and the airwaves were right out. Nowadays we can broadcast damn near anything via wire and airwaves alike, and manage the ways and means it is stored with much more flexibility.
But just because the costs are not apparent at the granular scale doesn't mean that the costs are irrelevant. Consider what total junk the internet would be if we couldn't get electric power (or just couldn't pay for it). Consider the manufacturing costs of the high-end switching equipment that forms the backbone of our networks (and again, who pays for it). Consider how, as the breadth of our information supply increases, exponentially more processing time is required to derive useful results from it. It still is an economy of service and scarcity - it's just got a big bendy electronic joint in the middle, and at one end of that joint you have a bunch of programmers sitting at keyboards ... and among them the occasional fruit loop who thinks he's part of a "post-materialist revolution" on account of how much his job is like the one George Jetson had, where he would just push one button over and over until his finger got sore, and then clock out for the day.
Also, I'd never make the claim that, just because I can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely, the media I have duplicated has no reason to be scarce anymore. In terms of economics, I think the argument should be approached from the other end:
So you can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely. Why would you? What would be your reason for doing that? Are you doing it to keep a backup? That seems wise. Are you doing it to give it to someone else for free? Okay; whatever flips your cookie... Are you doing it for a fee, or so that your friend can avoid a fee? Congratulations, you are participating in an economy of scarcity. In the first instance, you're attempting to enforce one - and in the second, you're attempting to subvert one!
Welcome to the murky for-profit fist-fight of the "new economy", where we encounter such weird edge cases as fake "name brand" bags, patented gene sequences, generic drugs, and boxed copies of Windows XP h4x()r Edition selling for two bucks each, next to the hotdogs on a street vendor's cart. (Ol' Mr. Dibbler will even throw in Madonna's last album for free, and that's cutting his own throat; he swears.)
For what it's worth, I predict that the internet will eventually be paved over by amalgamated content providers, as we all undergo an intimately related transition: Our home computers will be replaced by set-top boxes that browse the web and run iTunes, and are all-too-aware of the latest high tech encryption and DRM schemes. We will pay one cent a month for each AIM account we have, ten cents per minute of video we watch, ten cents per minute of audio we download, and 40 bucks a month just to keep the thing online. And one hundredth of a cent for each google search we invoke.
I suspect these boxes will all be running OS X.
It's not a terrible future, not really ... though it is a significantly less flexible one. And we can pretty much kiss our "post-materialist" Valhalla goodbye. :)
Re: heh
Date: 2006-11-06 03:07 am (UTC)AOL's transition should have happened years ago. Telecom and cable companies ate their ISP lunch, despite their 100000 "Subscribe Now!" disks littering the earth. They didn't return to profitability because they shifted to ads, they returned to profitability because they stopped treating their users like garbage (spamming them, harrassing them) and trying to sell them inferior services that had become redundant. Now they've entered into a dizzying array of collaborations with the other branches of Time-Warner, and who knows where they'll go.
Your point seems to be that AOL abandoned charging its users for various e-services because it was no longer viable - and that it was no longer viable because, presumably, everyone else is giving those services away. But the problem wasn't that AOL charged anything at all - it was that they charged way, way too much. (And they were assholes.) Price-to-convenience was way out of wack. There's no reason they, or anyone else, couldn't create a more granular fee structure in the years to come. A fee structure based on a second-generation implementation of the email standard.
Would you consider it a fair trade to pay one cent per recipient for each email you send, if it meant transparently encrypting every message from end to end, and completely eliminating all spam from your inbox?
Anecdotally, however, it seems to me many people will be unsatisfied with the lack of choice and innovation from what you describe.
Exactly how will a different, more granular pricing system destroy choice or innovation? If you're talking about lack of choice due to DRM, remember that you're dealing only with copyrighted books, music, and video, and that music and video have seen incredible reductions in their perceived value that are probably here to stay, due to the drastically lowered barrier-to-entry in those markets. A catchy tune just isn't worth what it used to be, and now media outlets have to compete with that.
You could make the case that unfettered piracy has resulted in a more fertile creative landscape for a generation of artists and thinkers, but I'm not sure how seriously we should take that case. The real innovation wasn't piracy (which had plagued the PC industry for 20 years previously and almost single-handedly destroyed the Apple II platform), it was the quantum leap in device interconnectedness that made such rampant piracy possible. People got exposed to a whole lot of shit for "free" - but in retrospect it was more of a case like, people paid 1500 bucks to a computer company for a computer and 40 bucks a month to a phone company for dialup, and despite all the crap they got for "free" online, none of that money made by the computer company or the dialup company ever made it over to the record company, the book shop, or the movie studio. We went online as soon as we could afford it, but the money we spent in the process probably didn't go where it should have; know what I mean?